


Our Harlequin Romance

by kxssmybxttxry



Category: Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Horror, Alternate Universe - No My Chemical Romance, Bottom Gerard Way, Family Issues, Frerard, Halloween, Hallucinations, Homophobia, M/M, MCR, New Jersey, Night Terrors, Nightmares, Psychological Horror, Stalker, Top Frank Iero, senior year existentialism yay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-11-13
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:08:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 55,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27544372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kxssmybxttxry/pseuds/kxssmybxttxry
Summary: In romances like this, there's only one way to end. With a bang.
Relationships: Frank Iero/Gerard Way, Mikey Way/Pete Wentz
Comments: 6
Kudos: 20





	1. Violin Strings

**Author's Note:**

> !! content warnings (kind-of spoilers) for the whole story listed at end (read them if you want and then return before you read the end)!!

"Pencils down. Hand in your tests as you leave the room."

Another Friday, another stupid fucking test. Not that it mattered much anyway. As long as Gerard kept Bs, it would be fine. He could scrape by enough to get into art school. Even if it would leave him drowning in debt, he wouldn't have to repay it in the end. As for his parents, he'd mastered changing the letters on his report cards years ago. 

He jotted down one last word and put his pencil down, before his teacher could say shit about his self-prescribed morsel of extra time. It seemed she only noticed Gerard to give him shit, but as long as Gerard avoided it, he was fine with fading into the scenery. 

He kept time with the ticks of the clock on the wall, silently tapping his fingers on the desk in order, as he watched and waited for most of the class to drop their papers on the teacher's desk and leave.

Gerard didn't much like to be noticed, at least not when he wasn't trying to be noticed. Not that anyone had ever payed too much attention to him, not for a while. He'd perfected the art of blending into the background around the same time he'd gotten so good at faking grades; when he'd started at his second middle school.

He sat and waited to make sure he wouldn't be noticed or remembered, not for dumb shit like this. He always had to be the third to last one out the door, finding it best to leave after the cool goth chick that sat in front of him. He'd once almost made the mistake of asking her where she shopped, being mildly envious of her dramatic attire, but he remembered himself and his need to fade away. So she wouldn't remember so much as his name.

As for the other two, as long as he wasn't the last out of the room, his teacher wouldn't notice. And Ray, the person who was usually last out of the room, noticed him regardless, as he was the guy who sat next to him in organic chemistry. He too was someone Gerard had almost made the mistake of talking to, in a real genuine conversation besides labs during organic chem. He found his notebooks, completely plastered with taped-on photographs and band stickers, interesting. But he'd never spoken a word of it, because it made it too likely that he wouldn't fade from Ray's head in due time.

After Nessie had handed in her test, Gerard picked up his bookbag and walked to the front of the room to hand Ms. Jessik his own test, before calmly strolling out of the room. 

A strange calmness washed over him, it always did after something like this would happen. After it was all out of his hands but not in the hands of anyone else, so there was no one left to fuck shit up. 

It wasn't a happy feeling, just as if the rough waters of his head had, for once, come to a still. Or at least a tranquil undulation. Like getting pissed-drink to the point you just lie on the floor thinking about nothing at all.

Even as the bustling hallway kicked in, he still felt like he was simply floating along. People rushed about the hall, packed like sardines in a can, bumping into one another in their equally panicked and sleep-deprived states. He waited, and watched, from the small cavity outside the classroom door, for a break in the endless stream of students. 

Upstream, in the distance, he caught glimpse of a familiar mop of borderline jet-black hair. Familiar in one sense or another. He and Frank talked every once and a while, after they'd been lab partners in their freshman year biology class. It was for one project, one particularly shitty project, where the two had bonded, and where Gerard developed an interest in Frank.

Of course, Gerard had never mentioned it, and the little bouts of blank minds and sweaty palms kept him from gathering enough confidence to talk to Frank much more after that project. So the two of them just had their passing conversations every few months, to shake Gerard's mind loose, and let him slip a little bit deeper down the cavern.

Frank had remained entirely oblivious the entire time. As Gerard had intended, despite his want to be something more than almost-strangers. This year, he'd promised himself he'd change it. 

This year, he knew, was his last chance to take a stab at it, and it wasn't like he had a long line of other rosy high school romances to look back on an reminisce about. He had to at least try, because at the end of the day there would be nothing lost but hope, and that particular hope was dwindling with each passing day.

He could feel his heart beginning to hammer as he thought about it, like a flurry of bird-wings against the inside of his chest. It was almost exhilarating, if it wasn't nearly so terrifying. But he took a deep breath and ducked into the flood of traffic as he saw a break.

He tried to keep himself from getting swept away, but his head was elsewhere. People bumped into him like he was a fucking crash test dummy, yet he kept his eyes glued to the ground. 

From time to time, he'd break his gaze to steal a glance of the pointed face ahead of him, but every time he'd look up, he'd end up running into the end of someone's backpack. He'd try to compensate by shrinking smaller and smaller each time, no doubt terrible for his scoliosis. But it was just the way things had to be. 

He jutted his head up once again to search for Frank, but didn't see him this time around. He must've already passed beyond Gerard, but he kept looking, in hopes that he would spot one last glimpse of him before they disappeared from each others' lives for another month. He took another step with his head held up, and another person hit him. Hard. 

It knocked the wind right out of Gerard, sending him scrambling for his balance and everything he could feel falling out of his hands. His stained, green bookbag hit the ground with a thud, spewing books and pencils and papers every which way. He knew he should scramble to pick everything up but he could only freeze, leaving it all to be trampled by the relentless traffic of the halls.

"Shit, I didn't mean to do that." a familiarly warm voice said. "I'm so fucking sorry."

Gerard looked up from the floor, greeted by a thin meek smile stretched across Frank's sharp features, displaying his silver lip piercing more than usual. He knelt down next to Gerard to pick up some of the mess, apologizing a few more times for good measure. Gerard got up and aided in collecting his shit, but he tried to keep his eyes to the ground.

As much as he wanted to let them wander off to the person in front of him, he couldn't. His heart was already thrumming with the ferocity of a hummingbird's wings. He didn't need to add any more strain on his heart, afraid he might just have a fucking heart attack on the spot. 

"It's not really your fault. It happens." Gerard muttered, afraid his voice might break and give him away is he wasn't careful, not that his face was being too much of a help. He could feel the width of his cheeks warming to a boil without even touching them with his fingertips. 

He hurriedly scraped up the last handful of pencils and index cards and shoved them into his bookbag, hoping Frank would just ignore their little fumble and they could part ways and both go on with their day.

"Hey, Gerard right?" Frank asked, as they were getting up off the dirty linoleum.

"Yeah. that's me. At least I hope it is." Gerard awkwardly laughed, embarrassed by his dumb joke. He tried to hide his face behind a cascade of patchy black-and-red dyed chestnut-brown hair as he dusted off his knees, and prepared to leave this whole thing behind.

"Cool." Frank said, offering out his hand. "I'm really sorry, Gerard."

Gerard hesitantly took his hand, knowing full well that his own hand would be gross and sweaty and probably covered in rubbed-off graphite. He could feel his hand trembling ever so slightly as he grasped his hand, contrasted by the calm, warm, and dewy nature of Frank's. 

He didn't know how Frank could do that; just take everything with a calm and collected face whenever he wanted to.

"Hey, I can walk you to class if you want." Frank offered with a little smile. 

Gerard wasn't sure if he should to take him up on his offer, as much as the idea seemed appealing. He knew that if he were to go, the situation would probably arise where he could ask him out. And he wanted to keep good the promise he'd made to himself.

But after such a fucking blunder, and after Gerard's unrelenting hesitant nature, he found himself biting his tongue. He was unable to say no to the offer, but he knew it'd kill him if he were to go back on his own word when their little trip was over.

"What about your class?" Gerard asked, fishing for an out so that he wouldn't have to live with the regret of passing up this chance.

"They won't die without me." Frank said nonchalantly, "Besides, attendance doesn't kill your grade unless you skip more than ten times." 

Gerard tapped his fingers to the side of his thigh, from thumb to pinky to back again. He didn't know what else he expected. It was such a silly thing to overthink like this, he wanted to go, so why the fuck not, but he didn't want to break his promise. He also didn't want to be the reason Frank got stuck in summer school, or even just got a detention. 

But he wanted to go.

"Okay, sure." he said hesitantly.

They walked to class side by side, talking about their summers. Well, it was mostly Frank, Gerard being hesitant to offer up too much about his summer. Staying in his cramped bedroom, hunched over books and drawings all day, seemed rather boring in contrast to Frank's chaos-filled roadtrip in a run-down van to Death Valley with his friends.

It was almost a way for Gerard to live vicariously. He felt he hadn't done much with his time in high school, opting for the safety of his room, writing quests to play out with friends he didn't have and drawing characters he'd sometimes pretend to be. It was nice and safe, but it made the whole time feel like a blur, as if it were only one conglomerate instead of a series of years speckled with different exciting events, real events.

Not that his parents would've let him go on a road trip with his friends in his wildest dreams, but it would've been nice to attend one party, or go camp with some friends in the woods, or something.

But Frank was another creature with an entirely different life and an entirely different preset of boundaries. He jumped from one misadventure to the next; from a piss bottle falling over and spilling in the back of the van to deciding one very late (drunken) night to glue his sunglasses to his face so that his eyes would have 'automatic UV protection'.

Gerard would offer up little bits of reaction and tangential commentary, but he would offer up little of his summer. All he ended up offering was that he wrote over the summer, not wanting to go into detail about his little worlds that most people his age had since abandoned for the normal high-school dramatized gossip. Or in Frank's case, probably-exaggerated tales of a life well-lived.

By the time they had reached Gerard's class, he'd gotten a brief synopsis of Frank's summer. It sounded like a fucking riot, the way Frank had told it. But it wasn't like he could just skip out on class to get more of the story, or more of Frank.

They said their goodbyes, and Gerard thanked Frank one last time, biting his tongue as he snuffed out his promise, convincing himself there would be a better time. The premise was too daunting. The only time he'd ever asked anyone out was in the eighth grade, and that had gone horribly. Not that anyone was to blame but Gerard's own awkwardness, something which had only gotten worse in time.

Gerard watched the small window embedded in the door as Frank disappeared from its frame. He cursed himself silently upon realizing that he'd just given up what was probably his last chance to ask him out and for them to actually become something, with the end of life here soon approaching and all.

He tried to focus on the lesson at hand, placing all the effort he could muster into untie the balloons from around him, tapping his fingers one by one in the same silent pattern on the desk, but it didn't work. While his teacher was attempting to do a brief introduction of alkanes, his mind was busy drifting off into its own universe of regret to pay much attention to what was going on. He tried to ground himself, time and time again, but he could never stay grounded long enough to gather any coherence of the lecture.

He tried to convince himself not to freak out about it even more than he was; that he could just ask Ray for the notes after today, or on Monday, or something; but it didn't help that much. It kept piling on, one thought after another, the unexplored path with Frank and then what would happen if parents found out he'd failed organic chemistry and what if his parents found out he had intended to ask a guy out and what if Ray thought that he was a shitty person for asking for notes and everything on top, until he just couldn't take it anymore.

He quietly slipped out of the room, silently thanking his teacher in his sliver of non-panicked mind for implementing a policy where no one had to ask to go take a piss. The hallway was drained of students; a calming sight for Gerard, who could already feel his heartrate beginning to fall again. Not enough, he could still feel his pulse shaking throughout his body, but it was starting to slow.

He got a drink of water from the fountain before heading off to the restroom, so that he wouldn't be questioned by any teachers that spotted him out in the school's hallway.

The restroom was thankfully empty, leaving space for Gerard to clear his head. Though he was tempted to lock the heavy wooden door that led out into the hall, to ensure that he could just be alone and clear his head good and proper, he knew that if anyone tried to get in he could wind up in deep shit. And while he was a damn good liar, he couldn't explain away a call to his fathers' office so easily.

He sat on the edge of the bathroom counter, not wanting to spend his time in the stalls that seemed to alternate stenches of bad weed and unadulterated shit. He tried to run through things he could easily focus on; things that would otherwise be things that would distract him during class: the latest issue of Doom Patrol, the mystery band that was playing down at Vintage this weekend. Things that the could clear from his mind more easily than his long line of blunders.

He took a sip straight from the tap. It didn't taste particularly good, kind of metallic, but it was nice and cold and pulled him right from the stratosphere and back to the triangle-speckled bathroom counter. 

He took another sip, but as he ducked his head under the faucet, he heard the footsteps of someone outside. Someone wearing Docs or some similar work boots, a student. He shut off the water immediately and listened attentively for the sound of the bathroom door. His pulse quickening by the moment, anticipating his supposed calm-down ritual being interrupted.

The door shook. Without a beat, Gerard ran into a stall and locked the door behind before he could even see the door open.

"Fuckssake." someone cursed in a harsh but hushed tone. It took Gerard a moment to place the voice, too caught up in his head, but he soon recognized it to be Frank's. "Hello?" he asked, announcing himself.

He paused for a while, then Gerard heard the main bathroom door lock, sending his heart pounding again. This wasn't what he wanted, to have some fucking teacher find him skipping class, or at least what was deemed as such as his school, and wind up with shit with his parents. On top of that, he sure as hell hadn't prepared to talk to Frank again, not so soon, when he already gone back on his promise once, for fuck's sake. 

As if God were against him in a very special sort of way today, they were in the second-story bathroom. Sure, it was the best mens' restroom that Belleville High had to offer, but it was a bathroom that smelled of both weed and shit on this lovely Friday afternoon. How fucking romantic. Gerard couldn't decide whether the environment would make it more or less awkward, after all Frank had never failed to lose his sixth-grade humor, but it was still less-than-ideal.

He heard the switch of a lighter, before the room was filled with the tiniest waft of burning tobacco. It was a trick Gerard had learned in his early sophomore year. The third window of this bathroom was the only one you could open to get a proper smoke in, unless you felt like alerting the entire building with ear-shattering alarm system. 

No doubt Frank knew the same trick, something which Gerard had found surprising for only a moment. But he soon realized that just about everyone, everyone who smoked at least, knew the same trick.

The burning tobacco still hung in the air like a ghost that had almost crossed over, but what lingered was masked well enough by the constant shit and weed odor that stuck no matter what, well enough to get by without any intruding teachers knowing of the trick. Not that either of them had to worry about that, with the door locked and all.

The scent reminded Gerard of how long it had been since he'd last had a cigarette. He'd been trying to quit, well he'd tried quitting at least seventeen times in the past month, but he'd been so good about it this time around. Sure, it had been because he didn't have much choice, but he was still somewhat proud of it. 

But now, with his nerves and all going a hundred miles an hour, he felt his strength cracking. He was due for another cigarette, one last one.

He didn't want to take one from Frank, he really didn't, but he didn't have money either to repay him. The girl at the convenience shop, whom he used to get cigarettes from, had started being really fucking creepy towards him ever since he'd changed his looks. Ever since he'd traded in his mousy hair for something darker, and lost a bunch of weight, due to stress from his parents' reaction to him dying his hair. 

Mikey always had some, but he felt guilty taking them from Mikey. Like he was supposed to be some sort of upstanding role model, being the older brother after all, and the quitting and then quitting quitting just made him feel like a shitbag when he knew Mikey knew.

So he just sat in the bathroom stall, in a mix of emotions. None of them what he had intended upon escaping here, feeling the exact opposite of calmed down. For fucks' sake, he was more stressed than he had been before he'd stepped foot in the restroom. 

He sat, waiting for Frank to leave, and for this all to pass. Hoping that his teacher wouldn't notice his unusually long absence. Not that his absences went noticed usually, not by anyone but Ray. But Ray wasn't a snitch, not about these sorts of things, because he seemed to understand on some level Gerard needed the escape from time to time. Even if Gerard didn't say anything.

He leaned against the wall of the stall, his feet growing tired from standing so long in so tense a state. Immediately, he regretted this, because as he began to press his weight into the wall, the joints of the stall gave a most awful creak.

"Shit." Frank muttered under his breath. "Hello?" He asked, this time more definitively. He knew someone was there. "Are you alright in there?"

His voice was much softer and calmer than Gerard had ever remembered it being, taking Gerard by surprise. But it was a pleasant one, sending a strangely calming warmth throughout his limbs, ever so slightly counteracting his overactive nerves.

He held his breath for a moment, biding his time before Frank though he'd fucking died or passed out or something. It had happened before; people passing out, not dying; and he didn't want to send Frank worrying or anything.

"Yeah." he said, sharply letting out a breath he'd been holding onto for too long. "I'm okay."

There was a pause. It unnerved Gerard, so he held his breath once again, scared of what Frank was thinking right now. He knew it was fucking weird, to be sitting in a bathroom stall, waiting for someone to leave. He knew Frank had to see it as what it was too: plain fucking weird.

"You sure?" Frank asked with a note of concern. 

There was another pause of silence, before Gerard responded with the same exact broken-record answer. Then he waited again, for Frank to leave, but Gerard was all too familiar with how long it took to finish off a cigarette at leisure. And considering Frank seemed to be skipping, he knew it would be a while before he could leave, unseen.

"Alright." Frank said uncertainly, after a stalemate of at least three minutes. "Are you skipping or something?"

"No." Gerard responded, unsure of what else to say. "Well, maybe. I don't know. Just taking a breather."

"Oh." Frank said. Gerard could sense a catch of hesitation in his voice, but he couldn't place why is was there. It soon disappeared, though, replaced once again by the vibrant character that he'd known Frank to be. "Well then, come here often?" he asked ironically, laughing momentarily at his own joke.

Gerard couldn't tell if it was meant to be answered, even if it was a joke, so he just offered a timid laugh and let the silence settle back in. It was uncomfortable, but he had no idea of how to fill it. 

He could only hope that, somehow, it would pass quickly, and he could forget this day had even happened. Forget that stupid little promise which he had made himself, because Gerard was too much a believer in fate to think that this was anything coincidental. But he was afraid that this fate could be another shit one, which really would've been par for the course, but Gerard was trying hard to avoid it for the moment.

Outside, there was a bird chirping. One which his grandmother could probably identify, but he'd never gotten much into the taxonomic side of birds, simply preferring their company. He tried to focus on the cheerful chirping, set it louder than everything in the room he stood in, but the sound just got on his nerves. The chirping turned so fucking obnoxious, as his hunger for a fucking cigarette was irritated with each puff of smoke leaving Frank's mouth, taunting Gerard relentlessly. And this bird, this chipper fucking bird, was scraping out the last morsel of Gerard's sanity.

"Fuck you." he muttered under his breath. He would've fucking screamed it if Frank wasn't there, but instead he just tapped his fingers quickly and harshly against his thigh.

"Fuck you too." Frank said, in a sickly sweet voice just dripping in sarcasm. 

It pissed Gerard off, it really did, but he couldn't help that it made him go a little numb. He couldn't help it when a warm blush creeped across his cheeks as he tried to compose himself again.

"No, um," Gerard stumbled, "It's just that, um, that fucking bird."

He really felt like ripping out his tongue and its stupidity, but he just stood there, hands trembling once again.

"Geez," Frank began, "I didn't take you for a bird-hater."

"No, it's the fucking noise." Gerard said, he could feel the irritation seeping into his voice, but he was finally grasping at a bit of composure with it, "And that fucking cigarette. I haven't had a fucking cigarette in ages."

"So, you did mean fuck me." Frank stated plainly, a hint of a smile in his voice. "Not the bird."

"Yeah, sure, whatever." Gerard said, giving up. 

His face was burning a record-high now, but as least Frank couldn't see it, and at least his voice was maintaining its composure. Not that it would long enough for Gerard to explain himself, but he didn't need to anyway. It wasn't like Frank had taken it personally or anything, so he was really only fucking himself over, and any attempt to speak would only fuck him over more, so he was alright.

But he could still feel his self-appointed hell biting at his brain. And this was fucking fate, right? So what the hell. His fate was always going to be shit, so couldn't he take a stab at something sweet for once. 

Saying that he was going to do it was a lot easier than actually doing it, and he knew it. He'd already changed his mind one too many times for his liking, so he knew he'd have to do it quick. Before he did it again, before he could take it back, if he was going to do it at all.

"Can I have a cigarette?" was all Gerard managed to spit out. He cursed himself for managing to get his hopes up about it, only to mangle them as he knew he would.

"Sure." Frank said, "But I'm not rolling it under the stall or some shit. You need to get it yourself."

"Yeah, sure." Gerard said, abandoning his hiding spot, half-pretending to be pissed. 

Frank extended the cigarette out to him, and Gerard caught a momentary glance of him. He sat, perched up on the counter with his legs dangling over the edge. He was dressed in the same grey skeleton-decorated hoodie and cuffed worn jeans, but Gerard had been to panicked before to notice.

He exhaled a small stream of smoke, looking just like breath in December, only thicker, more deadly. Gerard didn't dare to look him in the eyes, but he could swear that they were bloodshot and a bit puffy. He didn't look again, though. 

He just took the cigarette with a solitary "thanks" and joined him up on the counter. It somewhat annoyed him that those few weeks of hard work quitting were now for fuck-all, but it wasn't even supposed to happen in the first place. 

He was just happy to let the thick air into his lungs and settle into his head. Sure, his pulse was still going a million miles per hour with Frank sat right next to him, and his self-imposed promise hanging over his head, and a million other things that hadn't managed to fully fall by the wayside. But his head wasn't clouded with as much irritation anymore, and that was worth a lot.

It wasn't a cure-all, it was far from that, but it let his head clear enough to finally ask something. It wasn't exactly what he'd wanted, but it was something.

"Hey," Gerard began. It was a race against time, trying to outrun the hesitant mind that remained hot on his tracks. "We should do something this week."

Gerard still wouldn't look at Frank, but he could feel the questioning look burning into his side. Then came the strange silence again, but this time it wasn't born of hesitation. It wasn't alienating or uncomfortable. It was deliberate and almost blissful.

"Sure. When?", Frank asked, his turn to let out a sharp breath.

He rapped his left-hand fingers against the edge of the counter, but it wasn't orderly like when Gerard did it, having the same quality as when people would tap their pencil on their desks just before an exam.

"I don't know when." Gerard responded. His head had finally caught up in time to remind him of his own idiocy.

"Alright." Frank said, scribbling something out with a cheap ballpoint pen, adding the scent of cherries which juxtaposed just about every other scent of the restroom. 

He handing Gerard a piece of paper, a phone number, but Gerard's mind was rushing too fast to read just what exactly those numbers were.

"Call me when you know." he said with another smile, before walking out of the bathroom. 

Gerard just sat there dumbfounded until the bell rang, announcing that he had just skipped class, even if it wasn't intentional. No that his teacher would've even noticed. No, only Ray noticed something like that. Only he and Frank and Gerard knew of the slip-up, if it even was that. Because, at the end of the day, it had landed him with a free cigarette and Frank's phone number.


	2. Jokes About Fantastical Deaths

The air felt like acid against his lungs, disintegrating them with every gulp for oxygen. It reeked of blood and rotting flesh, burning his throat like a dry liquor with each inhale. Little flecks of black burning ash dotted the hazy, red atmosphere, like some hellish snow in a nuclear wasteland. 

Something was burning, something chemical and toxic, but somehow it wasn't killing him. Not yet, at least. He breathed in and out sharply, in and out until a pain stabbed through his center, sending his lungs sputtering and hacking away.

His legs were being hit over and over, crushed by some force against the soles of his feet. No, that wasn't right. He was hitting something with his feet. So hard that his legs were sore as hell, muscles burning with overuse. 

He was running, faster than he could remember ever running. 

Why was he running?

No, he shouldn't ask. He didn't have time for questions, to think, to do anything except. He just had to keep running.

Something was after him.

He didn't know what. He didn't know why. He just knew that he had to get out of there.

He needed to escape whatever terrible fate he was about to meet. 

Death, no, maybe. Maybe it was something far worse. 

All he knew was that he'd rather shoot himself than condemn himself to that fate. 

He saw a figure. off in the distance, obscured by the smoky haze. Shorter than him, but running just as fast. 

No, now he was right beside him. He tried to steal a glance of the stranger damned to the same awful fate. No, not stranger. This person felt familiar, but his face was all blurry and distorted whenever Gerard would try to catch a glimpse.

"Come here often?" the figure retorted, mirroring his exact words from yesterday.

"Frank," he said, between sharp gasps, "What the hell are you doing here?"

His face changed. It was still blurry, but absolutely petrified. He said something panicked, something important, but Gerard couldn't make out what he was saying. 

He tried to ask again, but his mouth was frozen. No, it felt like it had been sewn shut. Like his lips had been completely removed from his face but his teeth and tongue and all remained trapped inside.

He strained his face. Extended his jaw so far it felt like his face was going to tear. It hurt, it hurt so fucking much. Like he was grabbing two sides of an open cut and just tearing open a chasm. Ripping his flesh bit by bit until, finally, his mouth burst open. 

His screams came tumbling out, of relief and of fear and of pain. And just as he was about to move his mouth to ask Frank what.

He was gone. 

He knew he was gone, and still he turned his head. No one there. 

And then he heard it, the most awful scream. And then an even worse silence. 

He tried to scream, but this time it was his throat. Covered in a silicone cover, trapping the air in his lungs. 

He felt hot tears welling up in his eyes. Before something scared it off. 

Something caught the end of his pant led. He hit the ground, face first. There was a terrible crunch before a warm gush of liquid pooled in and around his face. 

He could feel the pain, pain almost like when he had gotten the last of his baby teeth pulled. Pain where the novocaine hadn't been injected properly, where the only numbing feeling was the pure adrenaline. 

Suddenly he could breathe again. His chest moved up and down in a pace matching his heartbeat, scrambling for oxygen.

His face still hurt like hell, but there was nothing here. 

He sat up straight. Only now that he moved, he was able to feel the moisture on his sheets and clothes. Drenched with lukewarm sweat from his mind's own horror-show.

He kicked the soggy sheets off of his legs and only the floor. Peeled off his sweaty clothes into the same pile, hating how the fabric felt gross and tacky against his flesh. He stood there for a moment, readjusting to reality, waiting for the air to dry the remaining moisture on his skin. 

In the mirror, he caught a glimpse of himself. His face was red and scratched, like a dime-shop Freddy Krueger had payed him a visit. All over his body, the ghosts of purple bruises were beginning to bloom beneath his sun-starved skin.

He spaced out for a minute, just staring at his face. He didn't know what to think. How the fuck had he managed to get the injuries, he couldn't comprehend. It took until his loud-as-fuck alarm to break him out of his trance.

It still felt strange, the unexplained injuries, the nightmare unlike any other he could remember. But he had more pressing things to worry about, so he thanked his alarm clock for breaking him back into reality as he went to shut it up.

He had to think about how the fuck was he going to explain the injuries away, or even hide them if he could. He'd gotten enough shit from his parents for not being able to defend himself, back when people loved to toss him around in his first middle school, before he learned how to fade form people's heads entirely. He really didn't need that bullshit to start again.

He threw on some school clothes, and hid all evidence of his nightmare episode in the laundry bin, when he heard his father's footsteps walking down the hall. His father would always do this, looking for any and every excuse to give him and Mikey shit before left to begin his early commute to work. 

Gerard had really tried to understand, like his mother so often asked him to do, whenever he'd complain from time to time during their forced dinnertime conversations. But he just couldn't understand, and by now he'd given up on it.

Sure, he was stressed, but that didn't give him the right to be such a dick, but Gerard knew that it was also in part his mother trying to justify her own actions. That, Gerard could understand, not sympathize but understand, because he had to.

Just as he was buttoning up the last button on his shirt, the shirt that he'd had to iron the shit out after his father berated him about it, his father came barging in. He never knocked, maintaining the justification that this was his fucking house, that Gerard could move out any time he wanted to have his own space. Even though he wouldn't let Gerard get a job, and even still, he couldn't sign a fucking lease. So he was stuck here for another few months.

"Hey shitbag, you're going to be fucking late." he said, monotone and not yelling in the slightest. 

It was still threatening, but he saved his yelling for special occasions. Gerard, though he had lived through this his whole life, was no different. Sure, he was worse after he came back from the workday, but he was still shaken by his presence day after day.

"I won't." he said, making sure his voice didn't shake in the slightest. 

He knew that even the slightest of transgressions would cause an explosion, and it was too early in the day for him to deal with it. He was still reeling from his mind's nightmare, he really didn't need a real-world one to accompany it.

His father paused. He didn't tower over Gerard, being a hair shorter than him and a good few inches below Mikey, but his presence loomed taller than the Eiffel fucking tower.

"You know what happens if you are." he said, "And I sure as hell ain't driving you."

That was another thing he'd do, swear all the fucking time, a trait Gerard had picked up long ago. But if you dared to swear around him, you were the scum of the motherfucking Earth, fated for the hottest pits of Hell, and he'd be sure to curse you the fuck out for it. 

"Tuck your shirt." he said, making his closing remarks before he'd lumber on over to Mikey's room. "You already dyed your fucking hair like a fag, and I can't have you making us look even worse."

Usually, Gerard would wait in his room until he heard the sound of his father's Honda pulling out of the driveway, but today he just needed to get the fuck out of there. His breaking point was on the horizon and he was barreling straight for it. He couldn't deal with the aftermath were he to either explode or break down with either his mother or his father around. 

He was already lucky that he wasn't questioned about the seemingly random bruising, and he couldn't afford to strain his fortune.

He just grabbed his bookbag, a banana, and left when the coast was clear. 

Mikey, preparing a slice of toast in the kitchen, shot him a questioning look as Gerard ran out the door. He pretended not to see it, locking the door behind him. If Mikey really wanted, they could talk about it after school. They had the time and the lack of parents then. But, for now, Gerard just needed to get the hell out of there. 

By fifth period English, he was beginning to feel the lack-of-caffeine. Despite his parents' intense efforts at really nailing in the hypocritical "don't do drugs, don't drink, don't do anything" shit into him, they'd ironically pushed him right into doing all of the above. By seventeen, he'd found himself with uncontrollable addictions to caffeine and sleep-loss and nicotine and some more he still refused to admit to.

Coffee was one of those things that no longer really 'did' anything for him. At this point, he needed it to function on a basic level. In its absence, he could feel his eyelids like heavy velvet curtains over his eyes, threatening to drop and stay shut indefinitely. 

Mrs. Cook certainly wasn't helping his situation. She paced back and forth at the front of the room, reading a passage to a mostly unconscious class. Her flat voice droned away, making it more and more enticing to join those dozen or so sleeping pupils. It was, after all, only twenty minutes into class, and she didn't ever seem to give a shit. Or maybe she simply didn't notice.

In either case, he knew that if the principle or one of the other administrators walked into that class, there was a chance that he would wind up in deep shit with his parents. He couldn't risk that, so he just doodled away in his copy of the book. 

He started off with some leaves, something small to draw his mind back to consciousness. Autumn had taken over New Jersey in all its warm-colored glory by now, painting the sky in patterns of red and yellow. His pencils were all grey, but they worked hard to capture the bare bones of their delicate patterns.

But Gerard hadn't memorized the shapes of too many leaves, and had next to no creative energy to make up his own; so too soon he grew tired of drawing leaves, turning to Frank instead. 

It was a difficult task, with Gerard rarely having the confidence to look directly at Frank's face, stealing nothing more than brief glances. And he knew he couldn't ever accurately depict such beautiful things in the first place, having their own kind of life that Gerard couldn't fake with a pencil. 

He was more interesting, though. Wonderfully frustrating. 

His eyes, he could never get the eyes right, least of all eyes as entrancing as his. It was so frustrating, so terribly frustrating now, only useful because it kept him awake. 

He could feel the rage, bubbling up from his veins. Leftover from this morning, unconstrained by the old soothing sip of coffee. It boiled and boiled and reached a point, and he threw his pencil to the ground. He didn't mean to, but all he could do was watch as the impact sent the graphite tip and the wooden body flying in opposite directions. 

Ms. Cook even paused her droning. She didn't look up, but it was enough to tell Gerard it was time to take a break. 

He quietly slipped away to go get some water, passing by the same bathroom he'd had his encounter with Frank the day before. His number was still pressed against his thigh, in the pocket of the straight-legged black slacks he wore every day, but Gerard remained too scared to send him a text.

He cursed himself for being such a spineless bastard, but he couldn't help but grin. It cooled his nerves, remembering how he'd somehow stumbled into getting Frank's phone number. It was enough to get a sip of water without overthinking. 

For a moment, he was even inspired to skip and get his fucking coffee, it wasn't like he has much use here and half-dead. He didn't, of course, but he seriously entertained the idea for the first time in a long time.

He just kept the idea as that, and headed back to class. On the return trip, he poked his head into the restroom. Some part of him still hoped to incidentally bump into Frank, daring fate to make them talk again. 

But no one was there except the stench of shit, so Gerard closed the door behind him. He'd known for a long time to not get his hopes up, but he never seemed to learn his lesson. His mood dampened once again, back where it belonged and where Gerard fit best: shit mood and fucked head to get him through the day good and proper.

Back to the class he went, back to the back of the class where he sat alone in a corner with the hint of afternoon sun streaming through the always-drawn blinds. Back to doodling random shit in his book for whoever would get the same tattered old thing next year. 

He knew Ms. Cook was still talking, be he honestly couldn't focus enough to comprehend a single line she was saying.

Luckily, he was good at bullshitting his way through things, and when the quizzes and discussions rolled around he'd scrape by. Not that he was too much of a talker during class discussions in the first place, even when he had been paying attention. 

He could just read it once he got home anyway, maybe escape the house for an afternoon and get lost in the woods for a few hours. Find a lovely cliff to sit at the edge of and just read as the adrenaline kept him alive enough.

It was nice to think about, but truth be told he rarely had the guts to leave the house. Knowing how his parents loved to question every fucking move he made. As long as they were away it was all alright, but when they were there, it was pure hell on eggshells. 

He didn't like to think about it, because it made him feel so fucking alone. It's why he tried his best not to, but today his mind was going against all of Gerard's wishes. 

Not even Mikey, kid of the same parents, knew the lengths of the bullshit he had been put through. Being the older sibling and all, he tried to distance Mikey from it as best he could, and even Mikey had people to go to at the end of the day. Gerard only knew how to survive, not to live like Mikey.

Gerard was just alone. So fucking alone. He just couldn't trust anyone, for fuck's sake he could barely trust Mikey, and a complete stranger? Even if they could one day become friends? Never. Not that he had much social capacity anyway, but it still reminded him of just how alone he was. 

And never had he wanted to skip more than he did in that moment, not as far as he could remember. 

And then, he decided on it. He did something he thought he'd never do, but he really did need to get the hell out of there. Just as he did this morning. Out of this fucking place and out of his fucking head. 

The risk was so small, that it was entirely worth it. He really didn't want to end up breaking down in the back of class, and walk around with fucked hair and red eyes for the rest of the day. Displaying his shame smack dab in the middle of his face.

So he took his bookbag and tiptoed out of the room. Ms. Cook didn't notice a damn thing, not that most people noticed Gerard's comings and goings. A curse of sorts, but something Gerard had perfected as a kid who always woke up needing to piss or get water at three in the morning. Even though he'd grown out of it, the quiet steps still stuck with him. 

The second he was out, adrenaline shot through his veins. It was absolutely thrilling, as mundane as it was, to him this was a great risk. He stifled a smile as he walked down the hall, leaving to actually take a piss this time. 

But this time it didn't matter. He wouldn't be returning, until at least lunch had ended. Between this and the number in his pocket, he felt on top of the world. Even without his coffee. 

As he made his way into the restroom, it felt almost as if he were strutting. He knew he wasn't, but it really felt like he was. He was so high off his own mind, that he almost didn't notice Frank perched on the counter. Taking calm drags of a pale cigarette, just as he had been yesterday. 

Difference was, Gerard was in a completely different headspace today. Thankfully.

"Hey." Gerard said. "How do you pass classes?"

"My teacher doesn't really notice when I'm not there." he said, smirking a smug smile that somehow felt more cute than asinine. Contagious and spreading to Gerard's face, only his was only a normal smile.

"Yeah." he said, "They don't seem to notice me either. But I'm just too fucking paranoid."

He said it all, smiling as if it were some big fucking joke. In that moment, it was. Everything wrong was nothing more than a joke, in the shit-odored second floor bathroom with Frank Iero, because it was so much easier to swallow that way. 

Gerard liked it, being able to smile instead of feeling like shit. Today, only a fraction of his typical abashed self was showing, and he was grateful.

"Hey, you're the one being a decent student" he said, with another drag of his cigarette. It was fucked how pretty he looked. Just sitting and smoking on that counter like this were some fake-candid photo-op.

"Suppose so." Gerard said, joining him up on the counter. 

He knew he wouldn't be able to hang around all too long. Once the confident kick wore off, he'd scampered off to get some coffee across the way. But he was going to ride out this wave as long as he could. 

"Could I have a drag?" he asked, still surprised by how easy it cam out. Only after did he find himself biting his tongue.

Frank paused, looking not quite shocked, just estranged by Gerard's unusually cool nature. 

"Sure." he said after a moment, taking another drag before handing the stick over to Gerard, "No need for your own today?"

"Well I can't keep owing you," Gerard said without skipping a beat, even feeling his face open into a smile for just a ghosted moment. 

Internally, he beamed at his seamless retort. It was rare he had these easy kinds of conversations, sans disinhibitors. Well, with anyone but Mikey. Bur that was worlds different.

He took a long drag of the cigarette, keeping the overjoyous smile from spreading to his face. But the break, it paused his mind for a moment. He could feel all his false confidence disintegrating. 

With an exhale, he let it all go. Like a switch in his head, it was all gone. And all he could think about was Frank. Not this Frank, the safe, happy one. But the person in his nightmare.

It was so stupid, to let a fucking nightmare hang around like this and ruin his good moment. Not that he had much say in the matter, as the slight smile fell from his face, replaced by his usual uncertain stare.

"Hey, don't worry." Frank said, placing his hand on his shoulder in reassurance, the contact sending sparks through his entire shoulder-blade, "You don't really owe me anything."

"No, it's not that." Gerard said, feigning a cheap replication of his prior smile as he handed the cigarette back, "I'm fine, really. I just look like that sometimes, sorry."

He really wanted to be cool Gerard again, but he knew that character wasn't on-call. He was rarely ever even home, only coaxed out with booze and exhaustion and the like. Instead he was just plain, jumpy, Gerard. Overexcited at such a mundane contact, and scared of not being someone else.

"You're skipping class." Frank noted with a note of fascination and concern as he took another drag of the cigarette, "I didn't think you did that."

"I don't." Gerard said, not even bothering to fake a smile anymore, "I just needed to get the fuck out of there."

Frank laughed at the floor, joining Gerard in his abashed nature. "Class, I assume." he asked.

"Class, but also just my head." Gerard said, finding a hint of humor once again. "Same thing happened at home, I didn't even get my fucking coffee."

"Well shit, then." Frank said, the concern wiped from his voice. "Let's go get some fuckin' coffee!" 

He pushed himself up and off the counter, leaping without actually using his legs for anything more than landing on the scratched grey linoleum. Gerard couldn't help but laugh, being reminded not only how far Frank was from the floor but how much energy he could release in one action. He was a different kind of dramatic than Gerard, more casual and under-thought, a sort of uncut free spirit that he admired.

Gerard scooted himself off the counter, landing with a much less satisfying plop. 

The underwhelming moment didn't last for a moment longer, though. From outside the bathroom door, from the hallway, he could hear the clicking of formal shoes against the floors.

"Shit." Frank said.

He took Gerard by his hand and pulled them into a stall, locking the door behind them. Gerard's pulse immediately shot through the roof, but he remained still, as he always did upon freaking out. 

"That's my teacher."

"What the fuck." Gerard said, now annoyed more than anything, "I thought he didn't fucking notice."

"Fuck off." Frank said. "He usually doesn't notice. I didn't think today'd be any different."

"Well wh-" Gerard began.

"Shut up." Frank said, placing two fingers over Gerard's lips as the door opened. 

Gerard would've found it hilarious, like that would do jack-shit to stop him from talking, but this was Frank. It was still funny, but it was met with an equally healthy dose of oh-shit-Frank-Iero-is-touching-my-mouth leading to some I-just-want-to-fucking-kiss-him. Gerard could feel his face heating up to a nice blushing simmer as Frank peered through the crack in the stall door, looking for his teacher.

He tilted his head away when Frank removed his finger. He was grateful for whatever cosmic force was on his side today, having Frank turn his full attention to the interrupter so that he couldn't notice Gerard's furious blushing. 

The rotted mustard-yellow walls of the bathroom stalls rarely reflected much, too marred and absorbed in their own ugliness, but even they could display the redness contrasting the pale of Gerard's skin. He tilted his head to the floor, letting the ebony locks cloak his view, hoping they curtain off his red face in the process.

"Frank Iero." his teacher said from the sink area of the restroom, pausing in wait for Frank to answer. 

Frank, of course, being the audacious bastard that he was, refused. He just stood there, peering out the corner of the stall, smirking. "

I fucking know you're in here. You can't just skip tests like this." he continued.

Gerard, unlike Frank, was freaking the fuck out. 

Everything felt so calm, so terrifyingly calm. He always did in these sorts of instances, terrified out of his wits, but so fucking calm. It scared Mikey, it annoyed his father, but only in situations like this was it good. With one swift movement, he crept on top of the toilet seat, so that he could remain unnoticed. 

"Iero." his teacher began again, "I don't want to fail you, I really don't, but you can't keep dipping from testing periods. You're retaking six fucking quizzes and two tests on Friday, and I can't keep rescheduling these things." 

Gerard felt a twinge of guilt. Just because he was cute, didn't mean he had to be a dick to the teacher who was trying to help him. Damn, if his organic chemistry teacher were half as understanding, he would've been able to not get his ass kicked over that one D he got. He began to say something, but caught himself before the words came out, remembering that he had to remain a ghost.

Besides, he knew to not talk when shit was going down. Because it only made things worse. Only in the beginnings was talking okay, and only lies at that. By now, it was too late, and the shadow of Frank's teacher approaching the stall door caught and words that may have slipped through the cracks. 

"Iero." he said, his voice sounding somewhat defeated. "If you keep doing this I'll have to fail you."

Frank didn't look nearly as happy as he did at the beginning of this, his eyebrows knitted, a slight from replacing his idiotic smirk from before. Both his feet were now planted firmly on the floor, no longer tiptoed, curious of what was going on outside the stall.

His teacher sighed a long sigh, his breath catching almost as if he wanted to say something but didn't. Another moment passed, before he finally started again.

"Who is the redhead." he questioned, speaking with the same diction he had when he walked in here. 

Gerard's heart skipped a beat. It had been a while since he'd hidden in bathroom stalls like this. He must've grown too tall to effectively hide by simply standing on the toilet fixture. Then again, the bright red cap of hair probably didn't help his hiding efforts.

"My girlfriend." Frank said almost too quickly, panic seizing his vocal chords for a moment.

"Jesus fucking Christ." He heard the teacher curse in regret, before pausing. 

The silence freaked Gerard the fuck out. In part because of what it usually meant, a bad omen. In part because he didn't know what Frank's teacher though he was doing in the stall with Frank.

"Frank, listen." the teacher said with another exasperated sigh, "I have to report anyone skipping, but I'll cut you and your girlfriend a break if you return to class right now, and actually take your tests this time."

The silence following the offer lasted a while, far too long for Gerard's liking. All the blood had drained from his midsection, save for his heart which felt like someone was taking a mallet to it ever quarter-second. 

Instead it pulsated through his arms, his fingertips, the soles of his feet. Most of all, it pounded through his head, ringing like remnants of gunshots in the hollow of fluid between his brain and skull. Counting each fraction of a second as if it were its own, slowing time to torture Gerard.

"Fine." Frank finally spat. It was angry and annoyed but it carried a secret guilt that Gerard could sense, even if Frank hadn't intended it. 

"Alright." his teacher said, no longer defeated but nowhere near triumphant. His voice was quiet now, not lower in tone, but taking on a more hushed quality. "See you in class."

Frank stood there for a while longer, like someone about to make some fateful decision, his shadow reaching across the grimy tile in the warm afternoon sunlight. Somehow, it let Gerard rest for a moment. It was a grain of time where neither him nor Frank could do anything, but where their fates had been sealed. A pause in the fluidity of time.

It lasted long enough for Gerard's heart rate to slow down to his normal eighty beats per minute. For once, fate's timing was perfect, and the silence lingered not a moment too long.

"Shit." Frank cursed. "Shit, shit, motherfucking shit why-the-fuck."

"Your girlfriend?" Gerard asked, disregarding Frank's dilemma, if it could even be considered that. He laughed, unsure if he should be offended or flattered. "What the hell was that?"

"Well you're pretty enough." Frank said with a smile. He tried to make it look like a smirk, if Gerard hadn't been so familiar with his real smirk he would've been convinced, but it was a smile and Gerard knew it. And that knowledge made the blood return to Gerard's face, not as bad as before, but still evident. And unfortunately, this time, Frank could see it on full display.

"I ain't that fuckin' pretty." Gerard said, tucking a stray piece of hair back behind his ear to distract himself from himself. 

"Aw, come on." Frank said, "You're fuckin' pretty. You're just too hard on yourself."

Suddenly, Gerard wished he hadn't brought up the subject. Well, in part he didn't. It was fucking fantastic to be complimented, to be complemented by Frank-fuckin'-Iero at that, but it was fucking nerve-wracking.

"Yeah, I don't know if I should take that kind of advice from someone who's supposed to be in class." Gerard said, trying to shift away to a different subject that wouldn't set his face aflame.

"Yeah, shit." Frank said, "But what about coffee?"

"But what about not failing senior year?" Gerard returned. 

He found himself able to talk again, without the words getting stuck. It was getting easier to do that with Frank now. It was kind of funny, the way it had worked. He was afraid it would all fall apart if he were to just ask the question. For now, he just wanted to daydream on what little memories there were so that it could stay this way in the real world. 

"Fuck senior year." Frank said. "Anyway, class is pretty much over. I wasn't going back, and he knew that."

It was a fair point, but it still made Gerard kind of feel shitty. If he hadn't been in the bathroom stall with him, he probably would've returned to class by now. 

"Just promise me you'll make up those tests." Gerard pressed.

"Yeah, no worries." Frank said, guilt once again gracing his voice. "Why are you so invested anyway?"

Honestly, Gerard didn't know beyond the fact that he was Frank. So he just shrugged his shoulders and stood there dumbly, knowing Frank would eventually figure out something to say or do. He always did, it was just in his nature, and Gerard was glad for that.

"Alright", Frank said.

He seemed a little let down, like he was asking some question that Gerard didn't really get and therefor hadn't answered, but Gerard couldn't pick out what that question was. Not that Frank seemed to care about it enough to ditch the conversation altogether, offering to take Gerard out for that coffee he had spoken of before.

And there was no way in hell Gerard was about to decline either free coffee or an outing with Frank Iero, nevermind both. So, as the first lunch bell rang, they made their way out of the restroom and out into fall scenery.

The walk to the local coffee shop wasn't the prettiest, it never had been, but something about the fall leaves always made it seem intentional. By the time they had shriveled and crisped up, the facade was ruined, giving way to its natural atmosphere. But for now, the red and golden tones elevated the litter-wrecked landscape and the crumbling buildings.

"It's pretty, this time of year." Gerard noted, for the sake of saying it.

"Yeah." Frank agreed. 

It was funny, how Gerard hadn't bothered to notice until now. He wasn't funny, he wasn't panicked, he wasn't concerned, he was just Frank in that moment. He hadn't heard the normal Frank tone in the past while; their few conversations usually panicking about shit or some try at humor. 

"I think fall is my favorite season." Frank continued. "It's beautiful but it's also when a lot of spooky shit happens. I always end up spending way too much time watching shitty horror movies but it's fucking fantastic."

"Yeah, I love horror movies. I don't get to watch them much, but they're my favorite genre." Gerard said, holding back the urge to ramble on about his favorites.

"Totally," Frank continued, the sparkle in his eyes gleaming through in his voice, "They used to give me the worst nightmares as a kid, but I still kept watching them, because they're that fucking addictive."

It was cold enough by now that as Frank spoke, his words turned to little puffy clouds that stood in the air for only a moment before fading away. He breathed out his words much like he let go smoke, though the fog didn't linger nearly as long, and it wasn't killing him. 

It still had the same entrancing effect on Gerard though. He found himself staring at the space between Frank's lips and the small clouds from time to time, catching himself just before Frank would notice.

"Of course, I don't get the nightmares anymore, but they're still fun as hell." Frank continued, the words curling around him in little tendrils of fog. "I don't really get those fun types of nightmares anymore."

"God," Gerard laughed, "Fun nightmares? You're fucking masochistic."

"Mm, wouldn't you like to know." Frank said, as if Gerard had really even asked. "You've never had a fun nightmare? Not even an interesting one; one that's fun in hindsight?"

He said it as if were this essential piece to life. As if Gerard couldn't have a decent life without fucking 'fun nightmares', whatever the hell those were. Even if he had plenty of interesting nightmares, which he did have a fucking library the size of The Library of, he didn't want Frank prodding around in those nightmares.

"Yeah. Of course I've had plenty." Gerard said, "You've even made a guest appearance, my friend. But they're not fun, how the hell is a nightmare fun?"

"Really?" Frank asked, and Gerard instantly regretted telling him because he knew what was next. "What was it about?"

"Nothing." Gerard stated, but he could already feel himself begin to blush. 

"What?" Frank pressed, his voice seeping with intrigue before he broke off into laughter. "What was it, an x-rated slasher nightmare?"

"No, fuck no." Gerard said, knowing it was a joke but still knowing his face was turning pinker by the moment. "You were just there and then you fucking died, you idiot. More botched art film attempt than anything."

Frank stopped laughing and paused, pursing his lips. "I died?" he finally asked. "How? Why?"

Gerard debated whether or not he should lie. It wasn't anything particularly weird, but if Frank wanted to decipher whatever hidden meaning was there, Gerard didn't know what he would find. If he lied, he could manipulate, in part, what Frank would decide his nightmare meant. If he told the truth, it would mean that, maybe, he wouldn't be thinking about it that night and induce another.

"I don't know." Gerard said, settling for somewhere in the middle. "You were running and then you disappeared and I just heard this bloodcurdling scream."

"Freaky." Frank said. 

They didn't talk much after that, but they were too busy refueling on coffee to care. It was just nice to have the company of another person, at least Gerard found it that way. At first he had found their silence unsettling, thinking that maybe he'd said something wrong or didn't way something right, but eventually he settled into it. 

He enjoyed it, he really did, and he silently prayed they'd do it again as they walked through the school gates, the final lunch bell ringing.


	3. It's Funny When You're Frightened

The nightmare hung around in his head for a few days, lingering like cigarette smoke. It definitely felt like the type to become recurring, but Gerard hadn't had the dream again. He hadn't really any dreams recently that didn't disappear upon contact with the morning.

The weekend had come and gone without any change in indecent. He'd gotten tossed around a few times, once for a shattered glass and once for his tile-cleaning not being up-to-snuff, which it never was. There were a few other times, but his memory hadn't bothered to hang on to those incidents. It was all quite normal.

And just like every other weekend, he anxiously awaited Monday. Counting the minutes down 'til he could escape his family. Namely, his parents. Mikey was good company, but he had started disappearing more and more often. 

Of course, by Monday dawned and he stepped foot back into the stuffy high school, he'd spend every day in wait for the weekend. He never liked the boredom of sitting in class and letting words fall in and out of his head all day long. But he knew that weekdays were better. Especially on weekends.

Then he never ate lunch, and he rarely ate breakfast. It was a trick of avoiding his parents as much as humanly possible. When it came to weekend meals, he only had his dreaded family dinners. And he could never stomach much during those; they always made him feel like vomiting from the sheer nerves. 

He used to be better about it. Back before his father had become fed up with Gerard's lack of social normality; his lack of perfect girlfriends and boring platonic friendships, he'd been a somewhat chubby kid his whole life. Then the punishments became more deliberate and every breath more tense and he became more average, where he'd stayed for the past few years.

But then Gerard began to act out. In tiny ways; dying his hair, disappearing to go hiking every time he found himself with the gall. Neither of his parents had taken it well, and in the past few months he'd would up somewhat of a ghost from all the stress.

Today was the first time he'd actually eaten lunch in over a week. His weekday meals usually consisted of a coffee for breakfast, whatever shit from the kitchen his mother wouldn't chew his head off over eating for a small snack, and the same dreaded family dinner on most nights.

Today was nothing special really, besides that fact that Gerard was eating it. Just a simple peanut butter and jelly sandwich, accompanied by some carrots and mustard. Even as far as lunches went for Gerard, this was normal. The same thing made the same way it always was whenever he could manage lunch.

Even the surroundings were unchanging in location. He sat where he always did, his sketchbook accompanied by his lunch. He knew he'd only finish it halfway before the last bell rag, but he didn't want to worry Mikey. Besides, he'd feed some of it to the birds. 

So he sat and sketched and picked at his lunch under the old oak tree. There were many on the schoolgrounds, but this one was special. It was the side of the schoolgrounds that bordered a small forest. The wire fence that gated off the streetside replaced with a crumbling stone wall, a place where he could sit and do whatever.

It was nice and away from peering eyes. He could smoke his cigarette and sketch his drawings without needing to look over his shoulder every half-second. 

Under the continuously waning shade of the trees, slowly turning from orange to dead as the days passed, he'd draw his mind away from his life. Sometimes he'd write a bit, but drawing was his typical escape. He didn't like feeling obligated to develop his ideas into some big final product with an end, like a novel or a script.

Usually it was more a mix of the two; drawing but then jotting down notes about random shit that popped into his head. Today he was studying a pigeon. They'd always appear a month or so before Halloween, sticking around until a blanket of white covered the landscape.

People seemed to avoid them like the plague, but he'd never really understood why people hated them. He was happy to be the one spending his afternoons with the birds, though, so he didn't mind. 

He'd feed a few scraps of his sandwich-crust to the little winged creatures, breaking his attention from his sketches to watch them peck up the little crumbs.

Feeding the birds always reminded him of how his father had never let them have pets. It was something he'd repeatedly begged his family for as a young child did. Even going so far as to adopt the mice which were inhabiting the back shed during the winter of third-grade. 

It was, in fact, those very mice which had ended his pet-acquiring attempts. His parents had decided that releasing his adopted friends, and then showing Gerard his little mouse-friends' corpses in the traps was a good idea. 

It had done what they had intended, but Gerard had always found it incredibly fucked. He still kept watch over his mouse friends, but kept his distance, afraid that they'd wind up dead too. 

He'd been so freaked by the incident, that he didn't speak or even look at Mikey for three weeks. Convinced that he'd end up in a brother-trap, if Gerard were to interact with him. It took a solid hour of convincing from his mother that he wasn't like the mice. 

In hindsight, Gerard knew that mouse-killing wasn't an all-too-rare practice, but he still didn't like it. He was happy to sit there in silence, eating his sandwich and tossing his pigeon-friends a crumb every now and then. Sketching a few as they happily pecked at the ground.

He smiled to himself, instinctively suppressing it, but letting himself go once he remembered. He was alone. 

The birds could display such high degrees of joy, even through they had those beady little eyes and their emotionless little faces. All they had were beaks; they couldn't smile or lift their eyebrows or even display a distinct chirp of joy (not one that Gerard could discern at least). 

But somehow from the way they flitted and pranced about the ground showed such a simple joy.

He tried to capture it in his little book. He always did when he'd feed his avian friends. Usually, he'd get a step closer at recreating their joy, with each passing try. But it seemed that, lately, he'd only gotten more accurate. 

In fact, his pigeon sketches had become increasingly more violent as of late, despite their increasing pictorial accuracy. They looked fine, but the emotion was had an anger that the birds didn't carry. 

He'd chalked it up to his declining mental state, but in some ways he liked it. It wasn't right, but being right didn't always matter. The violence had a different effect. One he had not deliberately put into place, but one which made the drawings look almost like action scenes of a comic. Incredibly strange versions, but something about it seemed to work.

He was sketching Emily, his favorite, calmest and smallest of the bunch who had a slightly bluer turquoise patch. He started to sketch out the individual feathers at the tip of her wing, when he got the feeling that someone else was in the area. 

He quickly slammed his sketchbook shut, listening to see if he dared to look up. But the person's steps were too quiet to register in his ears, so he had to look if he wanted to know. 

He looked up to see Frank walking around the back corner of the school, his black zip-up hoodie and almost too-tight jeans standing out against the sun-stained brick wall. He looked almost like a Tim Burton character; his face angular, hair black as night, and jeans displaying his toothpick legs. He even had the dark rims around his eyes to complete the look.

He carried on, oblivious to Gerard for a while. Walking with his face pointed to the ground until he was in clear view from where Gerard was sitting. He waved briefly at Gerard when their eyes met. His hand displaying a simple open palm of five stiff fingers for a second before he shoved his hand back into his sweatshirt pockets.

He turned off of the pavement path, heading down the gentle slope of dying grass, toward Gerard's small cove. He walked around the birds, but most of them scattered regardless, startled by the unexpected visitor.

"Hey." he said, sitting a few feet from Gerard. "What are you doing?"

"Nothing." Gerard said, instinctively defending himself. 

He could feel his heartrate quicken just a hair this time around. It was enough to be exciting but not to the point that it terrified him. 

He glanced back at his backpack, reminding himself that Frank had interrupted his daily ritual.

"You scared the pigeons.", he noted, trying to be as emotionless as possibly without being cold.

He looked confused, maybe even a little amused. Smiling at the ground and barely shaking his head at Gerard's remark. 

"Sorry." he said halfheartedly, letting the tail end of the word linger for a bit longer than normal.

Gerard just smiled. He didn't know what else to do. As bad as he felt for the birds, who had abandoned their bread in fear of the stranger, he was happy to see Frank again.

"You never gave me a time." Frank noted after a brief bout of silence. 

His voice was still cheery, but now it cracked a tiny bit, letting a hint of disappointment shine through. He stumbled a bit after he noticed it, shifting his facial expressions until he was convinced he'd convinced Gerard that he didn't really care. But he really wasn't the best at convincing Gerard.

"Ah, shit. Sorry." Gerard said, "I-" he began, but the rest of the words got caught in his throat. 

He didn't want to make excuses, and he wanted to explain himself, but he knew it would raise more questions than answers for Frank. Besides, he didn't want to worry Frank, or really anyone, with his excuses.

"I meant to" he finished, after dragging out his pause for far too long.

"No," Frank scrambled, "It's alright, no need to apologize."

Gerard still felt bad about it, though. Because he had meant to. It was just that it was the weekend. After his mother had threatened a room check, spurred by her decision that her missing lipstick was tucked away in some corner of Gerard's space, he'd decided to turn off and stow away his phone. Until it was safe, which was only today.

He really wasn't supposed to use his phone, not for anything more than contacting an imaginary list of people approved by his parents. Of course that hadn't stopped him, but he couldn't risk his phone being taken away all together. Or even worse searched, where they'd find information that Gerard needed to keep them far away from.

"I really did mean to." Gerard said, more firmly this time around. 

He had the tendency to waver his words so that he'd always have the option of taking them back. He'd gotten shit from his family members and teachers alike for that habit, but it hadn't changed anything. It just seemed to to that, whether Gerard wanted it to or not. Luckily he'd managed to kill it off for that one sentence.

Frank didn't push the subject anymore. Gerard couldn't tell if it was because he'd gotten the point across, or if Frank no longer gave a shit. 

His face turned to stone as he appeared to think. His eyes looked at the ground, down where the pigeons had gathered before their meeting. Gerard didn't know whether to be satisfied with himself, happy in making it so that Frank didn't push the subject, or disappointed that he couldn't give Frank a better reason.

Frank didn't seem to have anything more to say, so Gerard crumpled up the remains of his sandwich and put them back in the tattered plastic bag. 

He apologetically looked back over to his friends, the pigeons of Belleville High. They'd returned now, still too cautious to move near Frank. They gathered by an overgrown shrub, one of the first plants to go entirely leafless under the influence of fall's cold kiss.

They flitted around, and Gerard could feel a knot of regret form from mutilating his sandwich where the birds could no longer enjoy it. He tried to push his regret aside, remembering how his grandmother had told him he couldn't feed the birds that much bread, as much as they enjoyed it. He tried and the rational part of him forgave the emotional part, but he couldn't untie the knot.

He turned to retrieve his sketchbook once again. He began to unzip his backpack when he heard Frank humming a tune, and remembered he wasn't alone. 

He zipped the pocket right back up, and looked back over at the birds, letting Frank's humming be somewhat of a soundtrack for this still and quiet afternoon.

It was a familiar tune. It was easy to get tunes mixed up once they were put through the filter of humming, but Gerard used to know this one quite well. It had fallen out from his regular music rotation, but he still knew it well enough to recognize it.

"Glass Slipper." Gerard said, letting his thoughts slip from his tongue uncharacteristically, in one singular quick movement.

"Yeah," Frank said, pausing his humming. "You know it?"

"Yeah," Gerard said, echoing Frank's word in a way that freaked even him out. "It was one of my favorites some time ago."

Frank laughed, and Gerard forgot about the guilt. It was such a simple and tiny thing, but he could feel a smile infecting his face. And though he repressed it for a second, he soon let it show, deeming Frank someone he could trust to see him smile.

"You say that like it's fuckin' ages ago." Frank said, still smiling with his off-center smile. 

It was a trait no doubt picked up from smoking, talking out of one side of his mouth while the other clung onto that expensive stick. Gerard knew it, because he too had picked up the same crooked smile a few years ago. Somehow, Mikey still hadn't picked up, but he'd always had his own way about things.

"Well, it was some time ago." Gerard reiterated. "Probably two years."

"Two years isn't long, you know." Frank said. "Unless you're a cat or something."

"A lot can happen in two years." Gerard argued. "And besides, two years is like, a quarter of my life."

"One-ninth of your life." Frank corrected, and Gerard wondered for a moment why he hadn't expected him to return with such a smart-ass remark. "And just how much can change in two years of your recent life?"

A lot could change, and Gerard could tell from the catch Frank's voice as the words spilled out that he had realized the same. Gerard, of course, shrugged off the question. As rhetorical as it was, he could tell Frank was still curious, but he'd just have to remain curious. 

He'd never been one to trust people with knowing much of anything about him. He'd had too many incidents where one of his so-called friends would either blatantly backstab him, or they'd wind up in shit and spread the blame out so that they wouldn't get into as much trouble. 

Not that his friends ever knew the difference between their and Gerard's punishments, Gerard having learned even before grade school that he could never tell anyone about that. People knowing just made things weird, and if his parents would ever find out he'd be cast as a liar once again, so he just kept his mouth shut.

Besides, it was one of those few things that people seemed to like about Gerard: the fact that no one ever really knew him. Well, like was a stretch, but it definitely made people intrigued, moreso than any other aspect of Gerard that showed itself.

He'd use whatever advantage he could scrounge up when it came to keeping Frank around, because things were somehow going well so far. Gerard was kind of wary of it, but he'd known Frank long enough to know this wasn't some elaborate prank. 

He still didn't trust him enough to tell him much, but that was alright. Because he could forget about his life for a bit for now, Frank's voice and the cold October sun pulling him away from Gerard's reality.

They had devolved into a conversation about 2000s punk cabaret when the bell rang. Gerard jumped, having forgotten that they were even at school to begin with. The birds, too, reacted with surprise, flying off into a rotting maple tree at the first toll.

"Shit." Frank said. He hadn't flinched at the sound of the bell, but Gerard could tell from the tone that he hadn't planned on skipping fourth period this time around.

Gerard, on the other hand, didn't really care. He was mildly buzzed from the surreality of his situation.

"Shit." Gerard said, echoing Frank's reaction with a more flippant tone. 

He put a crooked smile on display for a flash of a second. He was free.

Even if it was just for the moment, a spark in the night, he liked it. With his mind was too far gone to think about what consequence would await him once his parents made their way back home, he was free. Even if it was by accident, the joy coursed through his veins all the same.

"Well then," Frank began, "Where to today?"

"Anywhere." Gerard said. 

His voice echoed through his throat with a tone he'd never felt, never heard, before. It almost bubbled out of his throat, but it carried the lightness of the softest notes of a flute. He mouthed the word again, just to feel the ghost of the word again.

To Frank, this was probably nothing. Just another skipped class, as accidental as it was. To Gerard, this carried with it an entirely foreign emotion. One which Gerard wished could sick around for longer, even though he knew it couldn't. Maybe it was better off that way, though. It made it all the sweeter.

"That's my favorite place to go around here." Frank said, any regrets of missing class long gone from his voice. 

He had that mischievous grin once again. Never sinister, but always thinking of the most fantastic chaos. It filled Gerard with anticipation, knowing that he had something planned. Or some plan in the making. Whatever it may be, it wouldn't fail to be interesting.

The pair hopped off of the old stone wall and made their way back onto the path to the front of the school. Gerard started to walk back toward the front entrance before Frank stopped him.

He explained that there was a trail that went cut through, ending up across the street from the Dunkin'. That way they couldn't be picked up on the security cameras. 

Gerard had known all of this, but he'd forgotten in his joyous haze. He found himself happy that he wasn't so high all the time, because he really couldn't afford to forget shit like that. Even if it was one of the best feelings he could remember.

But for now, it was alright. He had Frank to keep him grounded just enough to make it. So he let himself float off away once again, and the two made their way off the campus grounds.

Gerard would sometimes go for walks in these woods. Whenever one of his teachers let class out early, or if he arrived too early in the morning, they became a temporary escape. 

He found the woods beautiful throughout the whole year, even if Frank didn't. Complaining that the mushy forest floor felt more like a rotting corpse, and about the assortment of litter from people passing through. 

Gerard had found these woods to be kind to him, letting him forget about life for a little while. They didn't have quite the same effect on him as Frank did, because he didn't need to get lost to find his joy, but he still found a different kind of beauty in the forest. 

They made their was through the turning leaves on the overgrown trail. Most of the trees' foliage was between the stages of peak color and death, giving sunlight a slightly rusted orange hue. It made everything look almost like a sun-faded photograph. 

For a second, he wanted to ask Frank where they were going. The question got far enough to mold the shape of his lips, but it never arrived. Curious as he was, he didn't want to know. It would ruin the mystery, and he never wanted to spoil a good mystery. 

So he just followed Frank out of the forest and around the area.

Eventually, they ended up at a park. It was by a large pond. Not one of those ponds where people treat it like a lake and have fancy little houses and expensive shiny boats to scare all the ducks off the water. 

It was one of those ponds that tends to be in the center of a quasi-hiking trail sort of park. Where a concrete path led around the pond, leaving a small barrier of grassy turf between it and the water.

Gerard had known this park when he was a kid, having come here with Mikey on multiple occasions after elementary school. Back then, on the occasions where they'd wait for the four o'clock bus to take them to their grandparents'. 

They never went swimming in the murky water, despite having dared each other every time they'd come here. They knew neither of them would dare go into that water and have to find out what happened what would happen if their parents ever found out.

He laughed to himself, finding it funny how far he'd come: how he was skipping class to be back here with Frank. He was a different kind of frightened now, and in this moment he really wasn't frightened at all. Fifth-grade Gerard would've been impressed by twelfth-grade Gerard, even if twelfth-grade Gerard wasn't. 

Frank asked him why he was laughing, but Gerard brushed it off again. It was too much explaining. Too much delving into things he didn't want Frank to know yet, if ever. He didn't want to give himself away, or dump everything on Frank. And he sure as hell wasn't going to ruin the fun they were having.

They walked some ways, before sitting on a rickety bench in a little picnic alcove that looked out on the lake. Out on the water, by the opposite shore, there were some ducks. The still water reflected the grey puffy clouds. Warped moment to moment by the ducks paddling. If Gerard were in need of a break, and here alone, he would've sketched a scene as serene as this.

"You're strange." Frank noted. 

There wasn't the slightest hint of disappointment or disapproval in his voice, simply existing as a note of curiosity. Not that Frank himself wasn't strange, being just about as Halloween-obsessed as Gerard, maybe even more. But Gerard knew it wasn't about that, or anything Gerard was prepared to resolve for Frank. 

This was about the things he'd leave unanswered, always with a hint that there was a monster of a story behind it. Gerard had never perfected the technique at hiding that, preferring to leave it unanswered and usually open-ended, leaving people to question it so that he never had to answer.

"Yeah." was all Gerard said, echoing Frank's tone once again. 

This time around it didn't freak Gerard out. he'd done it intentionally, knowing it had the tendency to end the discussion right then and there. 

But Frank was an outlier. He let the silence linger this time around, waiting for some further explanation to fly off Gerard's tongue, but Gerard didn't offer anything more up. He just sat there, watching the water, unwilling to break the happy moment he'd been caught up in for what felt like too long.

"Okay." Frank said. 

It still had some curiosity, but it was the understanding tone that scared Gerard. He said it like he knew what Gerard would've answered, like he was almost certain of it. 

Gerard was used to hearing the reluctant response simply soaked in uncertainty, but Frank didn't follow suit. It comforted him and scared him all at once. Gerard wondered to himself why he ever thought he would respond normally, knowing Frank better than that.

At least Gerard hadn't said anything, and at least Frank didn't push it anymore. 

He opened up the carton of cigarettes he always seemed to have on him and lit one. Gerard asked for one, feeling a twinge of guilt for always taking Frank's cigarettes. He promised himself he'd repay Frank in coffee on the way back, to dissolve the guilt enough to keep the fuzzy high.

"How did you get cigarettes before me?" Frank asked. 

It was rhetorical, Gerard could instantly tell from the tone, but he answered it anyway. It was something to say and it wasn't about his family, the topic he really wanted to divert from.

"I had a deal with the girl from the drugstore a few blocks from my house." Gerard said. "She used to watch me and Mikey after school, whenever my grandparents were unavailable. She and my parents knew each other from church, so she'd sell us cigarettes for near the normal price. But I used to get my cigarettes from her, but she turned out to be a real fucking creep after I looked different, and decided I owed her something more for the cigarettes."

It wasn't a story that Gerard couldn't share. Sure, if it reached his parents' ears he'd have to go apologize and probably get a few hours of yelling in, but it was small stuff compared to other shit he had in his reserves to share. Things that would lead to far worse, and he wanted to offer a little bit more of his past. Not too much, just little pieces like that.

"Huh." Frank said. "Well, you can get unlimited cigarettes from me in a few weeks. And until then, I can keep sharing." He smiled warmly. "We can keep this thing going, whatever it is."

Gerard could tell he didn't really know how to react, but he was fine with that.

Gerard found himself not knowing how to react either, to what Frank had said. Because he hadn't thought about what they had going on. He'd overthought every detail his brain could retain, but he hadn't thought about the basics.

He taken it for granted, that it was just bland normal classmate shit. But bland normal classmate shit didn't make you feel like you were floating. And the fact that Frank didn't know what to call it made it all the more plausible that this was more than a possible friendship which was growing. 

"Thanks." he said. He could feel a smile brewing within his facial muscles, but he kept this one suppressed, afraid it would give him away.

He tried, but by the warm smile on Frank's face, he knew his attempts were failing him. He felt that familiar warmth spread across his face once again, tinging his cheeks with a slight rosy shade that showed easily from beneath his pale face. 

"I did mean it, you know." Frank said, as if Gerard knew what he was going on about.

"What?" Gerard asked, pretending like his face wasn't giving away his timid nature.

"You're pretty enough to be my girlfriend." he said, before frowning at himself and scrambling. "Fuck, that makes me sound like an ass. I just meant that you're pretty and shit."

He smiled, not one of those smirks or those mischievous smiles, even though it was still crooked from habit. It was a timid smile, one of the last smiles Gerard would've though to see displayed on Frank's face for his own eyes, but it was. He felt a flood of warmth rush through his bloodstream, into every corner of his body, like happiness multiplied.

It was deafening. Like adrenaline, only minus the clear mind and the stress. Everything was clouded in a most wonderful haze, something within is giving Gerard another kick of courage. Before he could even think to stop himself, he closed his eyes and leaned forward, curious to see if Frank would meet him halfway.

A millisecond passed, the most frightening millisecond where Gerard realized that if Frank didn't he would have now officially ruined this thing they had going on. But that millisecond of concentrated worries melted away when he felt a soft pair of lips meet his own. 

It lasted only a moment, a soft and brief kiss, but it took the warm feeling that had flooded Gerard and ignited it, sending sparks throughout his veins like firecrackers. He smiled, a little dazed, head a bit too far up in the clouds to see much else than the face beside him.

But then an awful feeling came creeping in. In a flash he was brought right back down to Earth, after having successfully escaped for an hour or so. Something terrible was going on, or was about to happen. He just knew it. 

He always knew that sort of thing. He had to. It was essential to growing up. But here and now, it did not belong.

He looked around, scrambling for an explanation. He could feel Frank beside him begin to grow tense, but he didn't have the time to worry about him for now. His bloodstream was too heightened with hypervigilance to worry about that, because he could fix that later, explain it later.

Across the lake he spotted someone. A large figure in a long dark jacket over a cubicle-type suit sat on a park bench. Gerard couldn't see his eyes, or really any detail of his face, but he knew that he and Frank were being watched. 

"We need to go." he said, nudging Frank, who didn't seem to know what was going on, but seemed to grasp the urgency of the situation from Gerard's voice. 

They tossed their bags over their back and quickly walked out of the park, but the whole way back Gerard had a looming sense of impending doom. Even if nothing happened even after they had made their way back to the school grounds, he knew something was wrong. Something to do with that man, and he couldn't shake it. It almost felt as if he knew that man, and knew what danger would follow from then on out.


	4. Taking The Sound Back

Quiet. Everything was so still. Frozen in time, yet Gerard's mind was going a million miles an hour.

Something was wrong. Something was very wrong. 

That horrible fear gripped him again. The same one from the man at the park. Even when he tried to shake it off, seeing nothing around him to be frightful of, it kept its claws dug deep into Gerard's shoulderblades.

Cementing themselves into his very bones. He couldn't outrun it.

All around him was red. Not a bright red. The only light came from flecks of blazing ash which stood suspended in the air. 

Everything was a putrid red. Like rotting meat. Turning to a dark grayish-brown the closer to the ground it got. Almost like he was inside a giant hollowed-out carcass.

He looked around, spinning in a circle to figure out why he was here, how he got there, what was terrifying him so that he could know what to hide from. Everything was the same, in every direction. Like a labyrinth, only he didn't have to move to feel so fucking lost. 

"Hello?" he yelled, all hope lost.

He screamed into the void, daring whatever was embedding this horrible seed of fear into his heart to show itself. He needed to know which way to run. To escape this fucking hell one way or another. 

There was crack from somewhere within the bloody dome. It echoed, obscuring its point of origin, preventing Gerard from knowing where to go to run escape it. 

He spotted a flash of white out of the corner of his eyes, jumping to run before he realized it was something entirely harmless. They were just his hands. 

Barely recognizable as his own, though. All the meat had rotted away, leaving the skin to be pulled only over the bones and ligaments and some ghosts of muscles which had almost disappeared. 

His skin was paler than normal, almost as white as the tablecloths that his mother would always bleach-treat before they had guests over. Beneath the surface layer. a waxy hue mixed in with the normal bluish-purple tones that accompanied his flesh through the colder months. Almost as if he'd been embalmed.

He stretched out his hands in front of them, looking at them from a distance. He really looked like a corpse. It amused him so much that he'd almost forgotten his fear, studying his corpse. Even though his heart was still thrumming against his chest like a newly caged bird.

He tugged up the corner of his jacket sleeve, curious to see if the same had happened to his arm. 

But before he could satiate his curiosity, he heard another crack. This time he could tell where it came from: directly behind him. 

He started to run, his legs picking up their pace before his mind could even comprehend the danger barreling toward him.

The ground shook and cracked beneath him with each step. Crumbling like sandcastles beneath his scuffed-up boots, but he kept running. He had to. 

Someone stood off in the distance, a shadow. It looked; maybe it was Frank. He picked up his pace, screaming and yelling at Frank to run. Telling him that he needed to get out of there and save himself. But the figure didn't budge. 

Then it hit him. 

It was a different fear, one that wrenched him to the very core. It was familiar, oh so familiar, but it was ten times more potent than any other dose he'd had. 

That wasn't Frank. 

That was a much worse monster than whatever was chasing him.

He tried to change direction. But each time he tried to escape, the man would reappear, closer than he was before. 

Standing, shrouded in shadow. But Gerard could still see his eyes. They were glowing a mean neon orange. 

With every step away, he drew closer. Killing any hopes that Gerard would get out of this intact.

He turned and turned and stopped. Dead in his tracks. 

There was something behind him, something horrible. But not as horrible as the figure he couldn't escape. He turned around one last time, seeing nothing but a flash of giant yellowed teeth before,

He jolted awake.

Once again, he found himself in sweat-soaked sheets. It seemed it was never from fun dreams. His mind was far too occupied for that, even as a means of escape anymore.

Just horrific nightmares. He wished he could just divert into his stories, instead of his dreams. But he knew it didn't work like that.

He just woke up, in a panicked state. All he could think of were two things: who was after him, and where was Frank. 

The first one was easily explainable. Someone was after him in his dream. It was only logical for it to linger around from a nightmare. 

The other one wasn't so easily explained. For some reason Frank was in that dream. Not as a physical person, but an idea. He was somewhere within the coding of that dream sequence. 

With those two questions running in loops through his mind, Gerard tossed himself out of bed and changed his sheets for the second time in the past week. 

This time around, he didn't react when his father came barreling into his room. He didn't care when he chewed him out for still being in his pajamas. All he cared about were those two unanswered questions. 

Because he needed to know. And he thought, maybe, just maybe, the nightmares would rest east once they were answered. 

They remained answered in one way. Gerard knew that, logically, no one was after him. That Frank was at home, probably still asleep. 

But he couldn't shake the feeling that neither of those assumptions were true. He couldn't shake the feeling that Frank was missing and that someone was coming to collect Gerard as well. 

It faded after some time, after his father had left for work and his mother began her day. But the feeling still lingered in the back of his mind. Even though he had long woken from that nightmare, everything around him seemed dream-like. 

Like he was looking on at it all, through the eyes of some unsuspecting person who shared his name. 

To make matters worse, Frank wasn't there when he got to school. There was no buzz about a disappearance, so he must've been okay. But something within the marrow of his bones felt so horridly rotten. 

It was the only thing that seemed real. That and the paranoia. Everything else made it feel like he wasn't really here. Even if he knew he was. 

Frank arrived at the same time he always did.

He looked all disheveled, like he'd run here, but it still soothed the worry. Frank was alive and this was not his nightmare. Even if Frank didn't feel like Frank today, he knew on some level that this was him. It filled him with unease, but he knew that everything would be okay. As long as he tricked himself into believing it.

When he greeted Frank before the first bell rang, he could feel the uneasiness slip into his tone. He didn't mean it to, but Frank's easy nature made Gerard feel too comfortable, and he found himself slipping up from time to time.

While he hated to slip-up like that, it was nice to be less afraid. And while it scared him that he might off-put Frank with his unease, he convinced himself that it went unnoticed. 

He reminded himself that Frank didn't share his tendency to overthink things. He hadn't had it instilled in him the same way. It eased the sick feeling, but their good-bye felt different today.

The illness still followed him throughout his lessons, joining the questions that lingered in the back of his mind. He tried to focus on his studies, trying to block out his nightmare-thoughts. 

It hadn't worked the best, but it worked enough to get him through the day. And the nightmares didn't follow him into the night. And by the next day the fear had subsided entirely.

He waited for Frank by the stone wall once again, the place where they'd been meeting each morning. 

Today, he had arrived earlier than normal. After another blowout, with his mother this time, over forgetting to clean out the lint tray in the dryer. He'd fled the house once again the first chance he got.

He waited, reading his copy of Heart-Shaped Box as the dark blue sky slowly turned into a pink sunrise. He waited, and sketched the birds as they rose with the morning light. Time passed like molasses, sweet and slow, but he wanted to see Frank again.

This time around everything felt real. And that meant Frank would feel real again. And he could replace the nagging feeling that he wasn't when he saw Frank again.

He glanced at his watch, making sure he wasn't being paranoid. Frank felt later than normal.

But he was. He sat there wondering what had happened. Frank would've texted him if he wasn't coming, or even if he was late. He knew how Gerard worried, especially recently. Even if Gerard hadn't intended to let him know he somehow knew. 

He checked his phone one last time as the warning bell rang. 

Still nothing. 

Suddenly, the sun behind him felt cold. Colder than the misty dawn had been. It sapped away the warm notion that everything would be okay. He could feel the sickness creeping back into his marrow.

His heart grew heavy, sinking within him like a stone. It weighed him down and anchored him, making him not want to budge. Even though he really had to go to class, and his teacher probably growing less and less understanding of his absences, he felt like he couldn't.

But he did, because he had to. He dragged his feet to his first period class, sitting down in his corner-seat with a huff that caused a few people around him to stare at him for a moment. He didn't really give a shit though. He was too fucked to give a shit. 

About anything, really. He didn't pay attention to the lesson, too preoccupied with a mix of dread and self-pity. When the teacher called on him, he simply shrugged and returned his gaze to his notebook immediately. 

All he could do was draw, and write. It wasn't his even his sketchbook. Today wasn't a sketchbook day, not trusting himself to not ruin any of the previous things he'd doodled in there. And besides, he knew he couldn't get caught if he was drawing in a notebook. 

He sat in the back of every class, drawing and writing about his nightmares. He couldn't think about anything else, anything else that wasn't the fear that Frank was caught by his nightmare demon. And he didn't want to think about that.

So he paneled and re-paneled and sketched out messy figures, all in ballpoint pen on shitty 10-cent-notebook paper. 

The day's classes fell into one blur, and then the week became just the same. Just drawing and drawing until his hand cramped, covered in blues and blacks and reds of smudged ink. His entire body started to smell like the pens; cheap cherry-flavored cough syrup. But he didn't care.

He kind of liked the madness. It was the best thing he'd had this year besides Frank, and Frank had seemed to disappear. Even if he hadn't. He still heard Frank's name around, sometimes even caught a glimpse of him, but Gerard knew when he was being avoided so he just did the same.

It fucked with his head, and fucked with his studies, but it worked for his work. And it worked for home, where nothing was seeming to phase him. Where he didn't start hurricanes because he didn't start anything.

It wasn't like he had to pay attention in class either. No quizzes, no presentations, no exams. He could feel Ray peeing over his shoulder half the time to watch him draw, but embarrassment had become a foreign emotion by then.

By Friday afternoon, he had transcended the entire fucking galaxy. Gerard was so far gone into the cosmos of his head, that not even Frank fucking Iero could bring him an ounce of embarrassment. Or even anger or sadness or anything. There was just nothing but pen and horror and paper and lovely substances to keep him afloat.

He didn't care about anything. He just wanted to get the nightmares out of his head, because he couldn't stop thinking about them. About Frank Iero and that fucking horrible fear, that thing that was going to get Gerard in the end. He just needed to purge it all out of his system so that things could be normal again.

Back to normal Gerard. Fuck-up dead-end artist kid. Destined for failure and a short and lonely life. Back to Gerard who wasn't pins and needles all over. 

He needed to get rid of it all because every fucking day, as he was walking home from school, he could swear that somebody was following him. His paranoia was reaching a fever high and he hadn't slept more than an hour or two in at least five days. 

That fear which had been injected straight into his system, when he saw that glowing-eyed figure, resurfaced each time he was alone with his head. Even if it was in a much more diluted form, and even if he couldn't really feel anything, he knew that it made him sick.

And every day, he fucking missed Frank Iero. He didn't know why they weren't talking, or why he felt that he was nothing more than a ghost he'd imagined. He just fucking missed him. 

He wasn't sad, he wasn't anything. Even though he'd never really known Gerard, he somehow got him. And with him, everything was alright. And Gerard cursed himself for ever getting used to that feeling, when he knew it hurt so much more when it was taken away.

It would hurt, in a few years, maybe a few weeks. When the pressure wore off and he was left with nothing but his leftover emotions.

But Friday, at lunch, Gerard could smell that familiar stench of burning tobacco as he reared the corner of the school to sketch his avian friends. 

Frank sat, perched on the stone wall like everything was normal. Like they were okay.

He didn't speak a word and neither did Gerard as the two sat. They were still for a long time, passing a cigarette back and fourth. But after a few moments, it hit him.

Emotion. He began to cry, but then Frank kissed him. The pain turned into a toothache, but it felt like Frank was sucking away the infection with each kiss. 

So each one grew more desperate. He could taste pure cherry and cigarette and sense nothing else but Frank's kiss. It was terribly slow and deliberate and painful, but Gerard found himself enjoying the tragedy. There was something so romantic about it.

But Gerard couldn't fully convince himself that Frank was really there. He still didn't feel real. In fact, he felt last real than the last time they'd met here. He seemed to be nothing more than a ghost, even though he was the reason Gerard was left crying and gasping for air and all disheveled.

He wanted to ask Frank why they weren't talking. If he'd done something weird to put him off. Or if his fears were indeed coming to life, that someone was after them and Frank didn't want to talk about it. Or maybe it was something else. 

He just needed to know. The uncertainty ate away at him each time they broke away from each bittersweet kiss. But it was never long enough, and each brush with fantasy would removed him from his thoughts a moment more.

He didn't speak a word. He almost did a few times, when they'd broken for long enough to breathe. Long enough to remind him. But each time the question got caught in his throat like a cotton ball. 

The worst part of it all was that he could tell that Frank had missed him too. The longing expression on his face and the starved way he kissed left Gerard with more questions than answers. 

Needles pricked into his heart with every passing moment, draining him of blood. It didn't hurt enough to send him to sleep though, each kiss filled with an aching novocaine. 

It didn't last. He knew that. He didn't want it to last like this. But it was better than it had been before: without Frank. 

He missed their talking, their happy little escapes from reality. He wanted it all back to the way it was before whatever had changed between then and Wednesday. 

But as the last lunch bell rang through the school grounds, he remained too petrified to ask.

With a final tolling, Frank was gone. Like he'd never been there to begin with. 

All Gerard was left with was the memory and the faint taste of cigarette smoke stirred with cherry cough drops.

He abandoned his lunch spot, not even remembering to say his fare-wells to his birds friends as he left. He didn't bother to glance over his shoulder when the uneasy feeling came creeping back up his neck, even his reflexes failing him when he heard the crunch of leaves a few meters behind him. 

He carried the uneasy feeling around all day. Letting it perch itself upon his shoulder, where he ignored it for the most part. He just felt his heart growing heavy with a bittersweetness, because at least he was feeling something more than he'd felt in the past few days. 

All the way home, the uneasy feeling grew, from a lump to a baseball-sized tumor, but he ignored it. He was too preoccupied by his phone, held in his hand, the cursor blinking over a text he knew he'd never send to Frank. 

He just tried, as hard as possible, to focus on the only drop of good he could think of: the taste of cherry cough drops and cigarettes that lingered, because it was something. And he clung to it for dear life as he tumbled head-first into another weekend.


	5. Keeping Truth and Consequence From Meeting

Shit, shit, shit. 

Something was wrong, very wrong. 

Gerard couldn't see a damn thing. but he knew something was wrong.

His ears were ringing as if he'd shot himself in the head only to remain fully alive. His body felt as if he'd taken a stroll through turnpike traffic. But that wasn't what was wrong.

It was that uneasy feeling, that damn uneasy feeling again. 

No sorrowful bullshit could drain it out. No martyrdom. No snap decisions.

He couldn't escape it.

It was like the orange-eyed shadow had been liquefied and shot into the very core of Gerard's soul.

He wanted it out. He clawed at his skin desperately, but it was pointless.

The unease only grew. He knew. Frank was here. 

He couldn't see or feel or hear him, but he knew it. 

The way the magnetized pit of his stomach lurched, drawn to him whenever things were wrong.

Frank wasn't supposed to be there. But as the moments passed he could only stand there. As another wretched feeling boiled over, reacting violently to the realization. 

It was sick. So fucking foul Gerard was convinced that he was going to vomit into the darkness. 

He wouldn't be surprised if he had already. The air was acrid, to the point that it felt any water vapor present was actually bile. 

It would've made him sick, but he was convinced he couldn't feel any sicker than he did right now. 

The feeling ate away his bones and drained his blood and seeped like venom into his mind. It was all him. 

It made him miss the simple unease from before.

But it dragged him back to Earth. 

Slowly, he came to. Out of his head and into this place. Whatever the hell it was. 

The floor was cold and rock solid, like a basement floor. Only it was rougher than that, having a texture similar to pavement. 

It reminded him of somewhere familiar, somewhere awful. He couldn't remember, though. His brain wouldn't let him. Only letting him retch at the veiled memory.

This wasn't a parking lot or a road or anything. It wasn't that sort of pavement. 

And the air was't fresh and open. Getting thinner with each breath he took. Like he was in a giant box or something.

Frank. Was he alright? He was here too. Where was he?

There was something wet and almost tacky on his hands. Like he'd dipped them in overused paintwater. He couldn't smell it over the acrid air, but he wasn't sure that he wanted to know.

He tried to look, as his vision slowly improved, but he was only able to make out some shadows. 

He knew now. It was a rough piece of fabric, tied tight over his eyes. He flailed to remove it, but his hands refused to find the knot. Even as he threw his hands back, hard enough to shoot pain down the length of his arm, he couldn't remove the damn thing.

He gave up, knowing he'd need his arms intact if anything were to happen. And getting his vison seemed like a lost cause.

And something was going to happen. He knew it.

As he lowered his hands to the cold concrete in defeat, he saw someone. Back in the corner of whatever he was in, lying or maybe sitting on the floor. Gerard couldn't tell just what was going on from his obscured vision. 

But he knew he had to go. 

He scrambled over to the figure, scurrying across the floor on his hands and knees. It hurt like hell, the floor abrading at his already fucked-up skin, but he was too afraid of falling over in the darkness to stand upright. 

As soon as he got close, he knew something was wrong. So horribly wrong. 

There was someone else there. Horribly wrong.

Gerard couldn't see them. But they were there. And they were here to get Gerard. 

But they didn't move. 

And neither did the slumped figure.

There was a pool of that tacky stuff by the figure. Something bad happened. Not being here, not this place, something bigger. Everything was falling into place and everything was falling through to more and more questions.

He needed to know who it was. He couldn't find the other person. 

But he needed to know who the slumped figure was. In his heart, he already knew. But as if it would change anything, he squinted to see through the fibers of the rough blindfold.

Frank.

It changed nothing.

The figure was Frank and the tacky stuff was blood and horrible horrible. Sick. Fucking sick.

He couldn't remember holding anything, but he dropped the contents in his hand.

It clattered to the floor. 

A knife. It sounded like a knife. He knew it was a knife.

No, he hadn't. He couldn't. Why would he ever do that? Why couldn't he remember it, or how he got there, or how long he'd even been holding the knife? What the hell was going on?

Sick, sick, sicksicksicksicksick. 

His guts all mangled on the inside, somehow leaving him still alive and so sicksicksick. He didn't need to see it to know what was going on. 

Awayaway. Out of here. getthefuckoutofhere.

There was no was out of here.

Gerard jumped up on his feet, only to stumble back again and crash his head into the concrete. He felt the tacky liquid pour and pool around him, still warm this time. 

Something about it was so calm. Nicer than a warm bath. Safe.

But it wasn't right. Something was wrong. Something more.

He'd cracked his head, but there was no blood. Not by his scalp. 

Where was it coming from.

He could finally feel it. A pain blooming in the center of his chest. 

He could finally see it. Someone stood above him.

At first he couldn't tell who it was. At first he thought it was the one here to get Gerard. 

The face finally came into focus. The blindfold had melted away, only leaving its trace of abraded skin, giving Gerard his vision back.

It was Frank. His face brought back to life with a look of pure horror.

Sicksicksick.that wasn't Frank. It couldn't be. 

Frank was dead. 

Frank wouldn't kill him. 

Gerard couldn't've killed Frank. 

No. It was that thing, that horrible third person in the room. Wearing his face, like some sick Halloween mask, the Hannibal Lecter motherfucker.

It made his skin crawl.

getthefuckup.outoutout.

He pushed off the concrete, running like a bat out of hell. He didn't watch he just ran. As far and as fast as his legs would carry him.

They burned with pain but he carried on, numbing it all with adrenaline. 

On and on before he remembered. 

This was a box. There was no way out. 

His legs wouldn't stop, though. 

He couldn't even look up before. He crashed straight into the cement wall.

His whole body seemed to crunch under the force. The worst pain of his life took over his entire body. Almost to the point where he was numb.

His eyes shot back open. 

He was panting like he'd just run a marathon. Pain shot up and down his entire body. He was woozy again, but he was more coherent this time around. 

Coherent enough to know he was in a different room. Dark, just like the last, but the ground was wood and there was a window. He wanted to jump and run, but he was still too incoherent for that.

By the time his mind had cleared enough to realize where he was, still reeling from the pain and the horrific Frank-mask, he no longer wanted to run. 

He was back in his bedroom, staring at the popcorn ceiling from the floor. He didn't have to run anymore, because there was nowhere to run to. He knew this hell very well, and knew he would survive it. He didn't need to run. Not now.

He lay there for a little bit, preparing himself for the pain of standing up, or really moving in any way. He took shallow breaths, minding his ribs which ached each time he moved them. With one more careful breath, he hoisted himself off the floor, using the side of his bed as a crutch of sorts.

He cautiously pulled up the side of his t-shirt, surveying the damage in the cold moonlight. The bruises were already starting to bloom, turning his almost translucent skin a dark purple all down his side. He gently poked them as he always did with his injuries, wincing in pain each time.

From the reflection off his window, he could see that his face had received a fair bit of damage as well. It was bleeding as if he'd gotten into a mild fistfight. He'd even bruised a bit of his cheekbone, and the corner of his lower lip was angry-red and swollen.

Unwilling to explain his injuries, he went in search of some clothes to disguise it. Considering his parents hadn't woken up from what had to be a loud fucking bang when he hit the ground, he was already testing his luck. So, even if it was the middle of the night, he pulled an old oversized sweatshirt over his head and some long socks on his feet to cover up the damage. 

He stepped carefully down the hall, avoiding the creaky floorboards and walking painfully precisely with each step. He slowly made his way out into the kitchen, where they stored the extra-strength ibuprofen. 

He knew exactly where it was, useful considering he was trying to make as little noise as possible. It was where it always was, in the third drawer from the sink, in the weird pocket of space where the silverware bin didn't quite reach. 

Even when him and Mikey were kids, it was always there. It was one of the medicines they would keep out, because him and Mikey they both hated the stuff after making the repeated mistake of chewing the pills. 

By now, he knew that you were supposed to swallow the tablet whole. And even if he wasn't supposed to mix it with the lack of food and excess of booze that ran rampant through his system, he needed to ease the pain. He'd never had trouble with doing it before, and he really needed it now more than he'd ever.

He took silently opened the stained kitchen cabinet and retrieved a glass, filling it up with a slow stream of water as not to cause any unnecessary noise. 

As he stood by the sink, waiting for the glass to fill enough, the hairs stood up on the back of his neck. Someone was nearing the kitchen. He turned around to see the back of a figure by the end of the main hallway, out by the living room. 

He couldn't make out who it was, but it felt too much like his nightmare to stick around. Glass in tow, he tried to get the fuck out of there as quick and as quietly as he could, before he was noticed.

But the person did take notice. They swung a bat at him, and on instinct, he cowered backwards. He threw the glass in the direction of the dining area, out of surprise and shock and maybe self-defense, but he knew he was fucked when he heard it shatter somewhere off in the distance. One way or another.

He turned to make a run for it. But before he could high-tail it out of there the figure harshly whispered, "Gerard?"

Mikey. Of course, it was Mikey. He cursed himself for immediately jumping to the break-in conclusion, when Gerard wasn't even alone in the house. Gerard must've woken him up with all the ruckus of crashing to the floor and all. 

"Yeah." Gerard said, still trying to wake up all the way. "What the fuck, Mikey?"

"Sorry." he said, now talking in a normal tone. "I thought someone was breaking in."

"Yeah, same." Gerard said, collecting himself. "Sorry 'bout the glass."

He lowered his bat. Though there was only minimal light from the kitchen appliances and what outside light made it through the curtains, Gerard could still see that Mikey was a bit shaken. But they both knew Gerard had been through some shit before,as had Mikey, and neither of them were easily shaken by shit like this. So things like this were easily forgivable. It wasn't like he'd killed Gerard or something like that.

That job was apparently reserved for Gerard's sleeping subconscious.

And though that he was fully awake, he couldn't shake the feeling that had been lingering off and on for the past couple of days. Mikey had been the shadowy figure in the darkness, he knew that, but he couldn't shake the feeling that someone else was out there. 

He flipped some of the less harsh lights on, but still no more figures revealed themselves. It still disturbed him, but nothing had happened in the past few days that this had been going on. And he had other question he need answered before he could even think of returning to sleep.

"Where's mom and dad?" Gerard asked.

Now that he was awake, he realized that there was no way Mikey would be roaming about the house, talking in a normal voice, if they were here. 

"I thought they weren't going anywhere tonight." Gerard said.

His parents had been home, at least when Gerard had last been out of his room. Really out of his room, not a quick and quiet run to the restroom to first vomit and piss, like he'd done once or twice during the night. When he'd last gone, to finish up his day's chores and get some water, they were sitting in the living room. His mother reading a newspaper and his father on the phone with some friend.

He'd usually listen until ten to see if they left, to see if there was the possibility of reading in the living room or drawing in the kitchen or just escaping his room for a bit. Maybe even make himself a bowl of ice cream.

But the flavor of Frank's kiss had faded too quickly, and he was left with this gaping cavity in his chest. So, like any self-respectingly self-loathing recluse, he'd gotten drunk out of his mind on the remains of a stolen bottle of mango vodka. And then, for good measure, he'd taken some pills he'd been saving, one's he'd found in his pockets after Mikey had borrowed his coat. 

"Out." Mikey said, wincing at now that he was close enough to catch a whiff of Gerard's breath. "They're gone for the whole weekend, I think. They took some bags with them at least. All I know is they're going some ways up the coast to meet one of dad's old friends."

He talked with a flat tone, something he did from time to time when he was worn out or stressed. It was a trait he seemed to have inherited from their father, though it didn't carry the same undertone that could strike fear into both Gerard and Mikey in the flash of a millisecond. Which was nice, because Gerard didn't want to be afraid of anyone extra.

It was the wee hours of the morning. The old kitchen clock read three o-clock, when any normal person would be asleep. Not that they hadn't been, but thanks to Gerard they were both now wide awake, and hopped up on adrenaline.

"What was all the commotion?" Mikey asked. 

He took a seat at dining table. Gerard could now see that it had been all scratched up at one corner, from his glass-tossing impulse. It wasn't too bad, but it wasn't fixable, leaving him dreading whenever his parents did end up returning.

"Nightmares." he said. He picked up the little shards of glass. They occasionally pricked at his fingertips, but he continued to finish the job. "Fun." he added sarcastically, gesturing with a half-hearted jazz hands.

"Hm." Mikey said. It was an implied question. One Gerard hadn't heard in at least six years, when they had moved houses.

In the previous house, the Way brothers' second childhood home, they had shared a bedroom as they always had. Their mother used to read Mikey stories until he'd fall sleepy enough to not wander around the house. Eventually, when she and their father had decided Mikey was too old for the stories, so he was simply banned from leaving the room after eight pm, just like Gerard.

So each night, the two would stay up talking until they fell asleep. They'd always have a brief conversation, at least that's what Gerard hoped each time. He just wanted to get to sleep as soon as possible, so that he could wake up before everyone and sneak in some television before school. 

But Mikey would have trouble falling asleep half the time. And in their brief conversations, Gerard would always end up making a remark that intrigued Mikey's mind. And since he was still only five, and since Gerard refused to tell him why he wanted to sleep, Mikey would incessantly ask for a story behind it.

It became an almost nightly occurrence for those three or so years. It had only stopped when Gerard was granted his own room at the age of twelve, after they had moved into this new house. 

Gerard would always know which sort of story Mikey was looking for when he would make a quick note of interest. He wasn't the happiest to do it, but he found the lying without the consequences thrilling, and it made Mikey fall asleep faster anyway. If he weren't chomping at the bit to get his morning television, he would've talked himself in to the wee hours of the morning. But he was still focused on his cartoons, so he never could enjoy it entirely.

Mikey was once again asking for a story, but it wasn't to send Mikey to sleep. They were both too old for that. Those childhood memories had been long left behind, to be looked at through plexiglass windows and nothing more. 

This was just curiosity. And for Gerard, this was just getting to sleep. They'd both be stuck awake for a while now, waiting for the adrenaline to die off. Mikey didn't have any decent party to go to, and by now it would've died off anyway. It it hadn't, Mikey wouldn't have even been at home in the first place. He would've been out with Ally and Pete in absence of his parents.

And Gerard, he just wanted to sleep again. Maybe he'd get lucky this time around and have a happy dream about Frank. Or even just a dreamless sleep.

"I've been having a lot of them." Gerard began. "Each time it gets worse, y'know? And there's always this really creepy feeling, like someone's after me. Not even that they're gonna kill me or anything, I really don't know what's 'gonna happen to me, but all I know is they're after me."

He took a sip of some cold coffee he had left out from dinner. It tasted like shit, but he hadn't had the time to fully realize his parched throat until now. 

He started telling Mikey about his dream. The dingy place and the festering feeling of sickness, taking sips of the coffee. Eventually he gave in and got a glass of water, because the nasty coffee really wasn't cutting it. He continued the story the whole way.

He started telling Mikey about the sick feeling. The really sick feeling, and the strange liquid on his hands. When he paused to take a sip, and clear his head, Mikey looked at him expectingly. 

But he didn't really care. Gerard needed this pause, because what came next was more concrete. And he'd have to be careful to not give himself away. His ribs needed a breather anyway, because all this talking was really doing a number on the despite the painkillers.

"So I notice there's this person in the corner," he said, once he'd recovered, "and they looked some kind of fucked up. At first I think they're just passed out but when I get there, I see who it is, and I know him. And I realize that around him is a whole fucking pool of this weird shit that's also on my hands and then I notice-"

"Who was it?" Mikey asked, interruption Gerard.

"Shut up, let me get to that." Gerard said.

"Come on, I'm curious." Mikey persisted. It was in that same tone Gerard had known throughout childhood, only much older now.

"Frank." Gerard said, annoyed. 

He really didn't want to think about him right now. He was already in enough physical pain to last him a lifetime, he didn't need some emotional shit piled on for good measure. 

That and he really didn't want Mikey to go overthinking it. Or even accurately thinking it, because he'd never really been able to gauge how Mikey would react to something like that happening. Even though Gerard had heard too many rumors about him and Pete, those were rumors. And it wasn't like anything was really happening between him and Frank anymore.

"Frank who?" Mikey asked, and Gerard felt just about ready to implode.

"Frank Iero." he spat, trying to keep himself from losing his cool entirely. He just took another sip of water and swallow it all like a pill.

"Wait, did you kill him?" Mikey asked. He looked thrilled, like he'd forgotten that this was Gerard's fucking nightmare that they were talking about. 

"I don't fucking know!" Gerard said, exasperated. He really didn't know. It had felt like he did, he had the knife and all, but he couldn't have. He knew he couldn't have. Even if he couldn't recall the imaginary memory of whatever came beforehand.

"Okay, geez." Mikey said, his thrill quickly dying off, sounding more like Gerard. "How the hell do you know Frank anyway? Pete says that Ness says that you never talk to anyone. And I believe it too, because you really don't seem to ever go to people's places or anything."

Gerard laughed a bit. The two of them were undoubtedly siblings for the first decade of their brotherhood. But the more time they had spent apart, the less and less they seemed to act and even look like one another. 

Mikey had stumbled into a bit of a socialite lifestyle under the wing of Pete, a kid who had rose to high school socialite status quickly. He had the ability to get his hands on just about anything: from a wide array of drugs to the coolest of abandoned buildings for throw raves and even just hanging out.

Or so Gerard had heard from Mikey. Ness had somewhat corroborated this with conversations he'd overheard in class, from sitting right behind her, but she tended to talk of him more casually than Mikey. General consensus was that he was a bit of a socialite though, at least among the general high school population. He was thankfully not one of the snob socialites that kept everything within their own circle. 

Mikey would've disowned Gerard long ago if he'd been swept up in that circle. Even if they weren't the worst people, they certainly didn't like people like Gerard. Even if Pete wasn't his favorite person, from what he knew of him, at least Mikey remained Mikey, without being doomed to Gerard's same fate. 

Frank had even mentioned Pete in passing conversations, back when they would talk. The guy was known by pretty much everyone in school, and by extension so were Pete's two best friends: Mikey and Patrick. Patrick stayed out of the socialite scene, having been friends with Pete long before his high school days, but Mikey opted to dive headfirst into the scene. 

Gerard, of course, had no such luck. Not that he would've enjoyed the partying anyway. But he still found himself jealous of Mikey, when he'd sneak out of the house to go get high and stargaze out in these fields a few towns over, with a smaller group of his friends. Or when he'd go to these underground concerts that he'd invite Gerard to. But Gerard would always decline, because he didn't want to get stuck all alone at some undisclosed location.

He'd taken the life of fuck-up teen. Not that Mikey's life was a parent's dream, but Gerard was Fuck-Up Teen Type B. The kind people were afraid would walk into school and just start stabbing people, or maybe one day they'd just find him dead in the second-floor bathrooms.

Well, that was the impression he thought he gave off. He never really knew for sure. It wasn't like he was noticed much in the first place, but people who did notice seemed to steer clear of him. And those who didn't were few and far between. 

And based on his latest dreams, or rather nightmares, he really couldn't blame them. In fact, he wondered why Frank hadn't decided to do as most everyone else did. Just run for the hills when he'd bumped into Gerard last week.

"We worked on a project together, back in freshman year." Gerard began. 

He prepared his cards to tell a version of events, one that left out the less-than-platonic interactions that had increased in time. Until now, of course. But he didn't want to think about that. 

He opened his mouth to say a bit more more, but at the last moment he decided to throw out the whole deck. It still felt to risky, even with everything carefully aligned. He was afraid he'd send his mind back down the I-fucking-miss-him rabbit hole. It was far too risky. 

"We still talk sometimes, when we see each other." Gerard said quickly.

He could feel the dread stir in his chest. So he got up with his now empty glass and left to take a beer from the fridge, the cheap stuff that his parents wouldn't notice was gone. 

He couldn't continue explaining. He was in so much fucking pain already, and remembering this bullshit would cause so much more.

He had to keep Mikey from asking. Gerard wanted to yell from the rooftops that he had indeed kissed Frank fucking Iero on multiple occasions, because even he didn't fully believe it. He knew he couldn't. 

His week had already been shit, and having Mikey find out and to have Gerard remember more clearly, that would be pure hell.

So he just stood in the kitchen, sipping his shitty beer. In some ways, it was a salve for the ugly hangover that was slowly beginning to infect his body, now that four o'clock was beginning to roll around. He could tell himself, that was the purpose of the beer.

The ibuprofen was probably helping, but it wasn't doing enough. And the beer wasn't a single-ailment cure like the ibuprofen was. 

"Huh." Mikey said, when Gerard turned back around. "So why's he popping up in your dreams like that?"

"Because shit happens, Mikes." Gerard said, mildly pissed. 

He wasn't pissed at Mikey. Hell, he wasn't even pissed at Frank. He was jut pissed at this timeline of events. How time, out of of all its possible iterations, had chosen this sequence.

"Huh." Mikey said. 

It wasn't a question this time. It's ending was clear and solid. 

But Gerard still felt the need to explain. It was some mix of obligation. Feeling like he may have given off the wrong idea, and made it seem like he was mad at Mikey. Or that he really wanted to just talk about shit to someone, other than the imaginary conversations he'd have with his cast of imaginary characters. 

"Yeah." Gerard continued. "For some reason he isn't talking to me but I don't know what the hell is going on because he just shows up one day and then just doesn't say anything."

He didn't think his words through. His brain was too sleep-starved and pain-drenched to properly think through a with someone he didn't really fear, or at least for those thoughts to reach his mouth intact. He just had to be careful enough. 

Mikey looked at him with a confused look, but Gerard didn't explain. He wasn't going to, unless Mikey gave him a good enough reason. And it seemed no reason was good enough. And that was the point of speaking carefully, anyway. He didn't have to explain.

"Huh." Mikey finally said, this one settling between question and statement. Somehow, he seemed to get the picture, at least enough of it. "I can talk to him about it if you'd like."

Gerard hesitated. He didn't know what Frank might say, what things he might tell Mikey. Because as far as Gerard knew, Frank had no idea the two were brothers, or that he even knew Mikey at all. But he really needed to talk to Frank again, because these withdrawal symptoms were the worst he'd ever experienced.

"Sure." he said. 

As if on cue, headlights lit up the living room. Freezing Gerard's heart in an instant. He and Mikey rushed off to their separate rooms, making it back as the pins of the keyhole were grated by the key in the door. 

Gerard thought they may have made it, but then he remembered the table. He was fucked.

He heard footsteps in the entryway, remaining normal until they reached the dining room. From there, they were slower and heavier. Like someone slamming a felt-covered rock into the ground repeatedly. They headed straight for the hallway, right in the space between him and Mikey's room, where the sound paused.

"The two of you are fucking grounded." The voice stated, booming and monotone. But never really yelling, not yet.

He silently thanked time for being on his side for once. If it hadn't have been four o'clock in the morning, he knew there would've been a more reactive punishment. Thankfully his parents were far too tired to even bother. 

So, at the end of the day, his nightmare aftermath had gone pretty well. Mikey was going to talk to Frank, and his parents wouldn't be awake to be livid until the proper morning. 

And come morning, Gerard would be sure to be long gone.


	6. Ideas Are Bulletproof

Gerard didn't sleep for the rest of the night. Or for the rest of the weekend, really. He was too freaked out, because Mikey knew something. It was intentional, at least semi-intentional, but it still stressed him out of his mind.

Gerard couldn't read just how much he knew, but he knew he knew something. Usually he could tell what people knew, at least when they were reacting to what Gerard said, but Mikey was different. He'd developed a talent for masking shit with a proper poker face, impenetrable even to Gerard's razorblade-eyes.

Gerard just spent the weekend avoiding any potential fights, by leaving the house as long as he could. He knew he didn't have the endurance to deal with them all weekend, with his dwindling sleep putting him on edge. So, he claimed that he was going to their church each day and staying out to help each afternoon, something which his parents were glad to hear. 

Though it had surprised them, his mother eventually convinced his father to trust Gerard to go on his own. He initially hadn't, wanting Gerard to accompany them only on Sunday when they went too, but Gerard's mother wore him down. 

In the end, the both of them seemed somewhat pleased in themselves. The looks of accomplishment on their faces almost making Gerard punch himself square in the face. 

They had convinced themselves that Gerard was kid self-injecting with sin on the regular. They had that notion for the longest time. But every since Gerard ditched the gelled-back brown hair and stopped going to church entirely, they'd decided that Gerard was past saving. 

They were convinced that he'd finally gone and sold his soul to the devil hisself.

And now, somehow they'd convinced themselves that Gerard was going to religious rehab. That somehow, God was going to fix their kid and make him the perfect little child that they wanted. 

Joke was on them. Gerard wasn't really going to church, and he sure as hell wasn't looking to be "saved" or whatever his parents were clutching each others' hands in hopes of. 

Sure, he was technically going to church, but only for a bit: just in case they checked to see. He was really just wandering around aimlessly all day long, reading and drawing and shit. Avoiding home.

He didn't entirely hate the smug looks on their faces, though. They were on the same side for once, for something other than berating Gerard passive-aggressively or straight up slapping the shit of of him. They looked genuinely happy for once, together, and Gerard cherished it. As faked and fucked as it was. Because the sight was an all-too-rare one.

The trick didn't last as long as Gerard wouldn't liked, but he pulled it off long enough to last the weekend. He still favored Sunday morning lazing about to church service, though, and his parents got pissed about it. He was still able to go out for the late morning and early afternoon, just as he had the day prior, but that was the last time.

That night, over dinner, his parents deemed that they could no longer trust Gerard. They were halfway convinced that he was sneaking off to somewhere else, and any suspicion was too much suspicion, so he was grounded from going to church alone as well.

Which Gerard had spent his weekend wandering around, but he still didn't think it was fair. He wasn't causing any trouble, just walking until he no longer knew where he was. But he knew he wouldn't get the chance to defend himself, and he didn't. 

He knew very well. There was no truth other than the one his parents believed. Not when it came to their household. He was well-familiar with that fact.

But the weekend had come and gone. And while Gerard was still grounded, he'd avoided getting kicked into tomorrow over the scratched-up dinner table. He was just thankful for that.

Unfortunately, in his avoidance of home, he'd forgotten about his organic chemistry project. And on Monday, on his walk to school, he had finally remembered. He dreaded going to school with it unfinished, but it was still worth it, to avoid home.

It wasn't really due today anyway, but it would be in a few days. He knew he could get it done easily, but he still liked to get things done ahead of time. Just in case shit happened, and he couldn't work on it due to extenuating circumstances. But this weekend kind of fell under extenuating circumstances, so he tried not to dwell on it too much.

Just as long as he got it done it would be alright. He could be okay and get away entirely unscathed. Well, except getting grounded. But that wasn't all that bad, not during the week at least. He could still pretend to be home, just until his parents came home from work. And it wasn't like he had a lot of friends to hang out with in the first place. 

He pulled out his phone to work on the project while a few people presented. He hid it under the desk, looking up from it whenever his teacher was looking in his direction, because he knew he'd be dead if he was found out. 

Thankfully Gerard was talented at hiding things. And he knew he could hide such a small thing easily, especially because he was sat strategically in the back of the room. It wasn't like anyone in this class would be expecting him to watch their presentations, anyway. It wasn't like he knew anyone here, at least not enough for that. 

Well, maybe Ray. They were on good terms even if they weren't friends, per se. He could give up seven minutes of his work time, though, to give his fellow outcast an audience that gave somewhat of a shit. 

As much as they were unlike each other, Ray wasn't phony like most of the people at Gerard's school. Not only that but he seemed like a genuinely good person. So Gerard quite liked him.

By the time it was Ray's turn, he was happy to have a break anyway. Especially one that wouldn't leave Gerard's mind wandering into what-the-hell's-going-on-with-Frank-fuck-I-miss-him territory. Even if that rabbit hole should've been done away with soon, it was still there to stay for the time being.

Ray started talking about something. Gerard wasn't paying too much attention, his brain fried form being starved of sleep. He was too focused on the little figurine poking out of Ray's pocket. 

Gerard couldn't see it properly from his seat in the back of the class, but it looked like a Spiderman action figure. It was just poking out of the corner of Ray's pocket. Gerard was surprised he hadn't noticed it earlier, and that no one else had noticed it before. But everyone else was paying just as much attention as Gerard had been paying them when they were presenting. And the teacher didn't care too much in the first place.

He was also surprised that Ray had the little figurine around him in the first place. Though, Gerard wondered why he was surprised. Ray was a mostly unpredictable person, at least when it came to things such as this.

He'd overheard Ray on the phone a few weeks ago, trying to convince his brother to give him his spare Quiet Riot ticket. Gerard hadn't expected him either to have a brother, or be into Quiet Riot. 

To Gerard, he'd always seemed to be more of a indie music type of guy, even though his notebooks and laptop said otherwise. Maybe a bit of electronica and shit like The Cure and Placebo. But he definitely seemed like single child type of guy, or at least significantly younger sibling to the point he was practically that. Gerard had been wrong, though.

Gerard found the Spiderman figurine less surprising. It was mostly his worn-out mind that was having trouble processing shit. Now that the concept had settled in his brain, it didn't phase him in the slightest. It made sense. It really did.

It made him even smile a bit. Maybe he liked some of the same comics as Gerard. Maybe he could even be some nice distraction from Frank. A real, solid, distraction that wouldn't end up with Gerard over a toilet bowl. Or clawing at his own skin or going out to feel his skin crawl as he walked around alone with his back exposed.

It made him feel a little guilty, only doing this to serve himself, but he needed it.

Ray was someone that knew Gerard existed, and who didn't avoid him like the plague. In fact, he seemed to enjoy hanging around Gerard, during labs and projects where they were paired together.

"Cool action figure." Gerard noted when Ray sat down.

Ray had never really scared him much, not in the way that his classmates did. Ray just gave off a different vibe, Gerard couldn't really explain it. But he knew Ray was someone he could trust, more than Frank and probably even more than Mikey. Even is he was a stranger, he got that vibe.

Though their interactions were very limited, Gerard tended to be good at spotting tiny details about people. It was an unconscious thing, and probably far from a perfect process, but it had saved Gerard on multiple instances.

It did leave him feeling he really couldn't trust anyone to be a good person, but he knew it was true in the first place. Most people weren't good people, and that was just a fact of life Gerard came to terms with long ago. Besides, in his line of life, it was better safe than sorry. At least for the time being. 

"Thanks." he said, a little hesitation in his voice. "I'm surprised more people don't notice it."

"Yeah." Gerard agreed.

He imagined what it would've been like, if he brought one of his avian friends around with him all day. Or even his favorite of his findings from his walks: an pastel green almond-sized frog charm. People would avoid him even more than they did already. 

Ray radiated these vibes that told people to trust him, though. Not like Gerard. So it was different.

"Yeah." Gerard said, biting his tongue as he did every time he was going to say anything that had any weigh to it whatsoever. "I'm going over the river to Paradox after school, if you want to come with?"

"Sure." Ray said, without overthinking it. 

It was nice, knowing that there was someone who didn't hate Gerard yet. Or just get enough weird vibes off of him to steer clear, because somehow that's what had seemed to happen with Frank. 

Fuck, Frank. Mikey could be talking to him that very moment. His pulse skyrocketed for a moment. But it shot right back down, still quick but where it belonged, when he remembered there was nothing he could do about it. Not for now. It still made him feel a little queasy, though.

All he had to do was ignore it. Maybe later he could do something, but for now dwelling on it wouldn't change a damn thing. He could just go have some fun with Ray and shop for comics, and forget about the whole shitshow that had become him and Frank. 

And maybe, just maybe, Frank could reappear again at lunch and he could taste a brush of life again.

"Cool." Gerard said, before returning to his project as the next presenter began.

By lunch he'd completed the project, working on it in several of his classes whenever teachers were looking away or telling everyone to discuss things among themselves. All his teachers knew he was the weird loner kid, and that he never said anything when discussions were happening. 

They didn't mind when he'd seclude himself with books and doodles and his phone when everyone else was having their conversations. Just as long as he had something to say if he were to be called on. Which happened more often than Gerard would've liked, but it wasn't all that bad.

Today, the air was colder than it had been the past few days. Even though the sun should've warmed the air in the time after his morning commute, it still felt more like the beginnings of winter than what should've been the heart of fall. 

The cold air grated at his cheeks, leaving them pink and numbed. It reminded him of his injuries, as his muscles stiffened from the cold. Straining the injuries that lined his side. They'd healed enough for no one to notice, but they still hurt like hell. Especially in this cold.

When he sat down on that old stone wall, it was like getting an ice-cube dropped down the back of his t-shirt. The cold stone shot up his spine, a different sort of pain joining his aching side. 

It took him a while to adjust, but the stone finally warmed up from Gerard's body heat after a few minutes.

He wanted to draw. Or read. Or anything. He was so fucking drained. Instead he just watched the pigeons eat bits of his sandwich, slipping in and out of consciousness.

In his moments of semi-coherence, he prayed that Frank would come along at some point. Even if they didn't talk, he could taste that sweet poison again. It was fucked, but he wanted it so badly.

It took a long time, and a lot of prayer, but eventually Frank appeared. He almost seemed to float, stepping with a level of grace unfamiliar to Frank's spirit. But every few seconds he'd snap his neck back to check, just as Gerard always did, making sure no one was following him or anything. 

It off-put Gerard, knowing that this sort of unease was uncharacteristic of Frank, but so was not talking. Everything was off about them, but at least they were still. Something.

Anything to keep Gerard's heart beating.

He would've asked if they were speaking, but he already knew. They still weren't. Not yet. 

And Gerard was rarely one to break the silence. Never one this fragile.

Frank gave one last look over his shoulder and seemed satisfied, sitting beside Gerard on the wall. 

Gerard pushed the remains of his sandwich, as some kind of peace offering. Frank accepted, but both of them knew it wasn't really a peace offering. It was an invitation. 

He pocketed the sandwich. They didn't want to waste time on bullshit like food, but he knew Gerard wasn't going to eat it. 

They didn't waste another minute, spending the rest of lunch doing just the same as they had done on Friday. 

He still tasted the same. Cherry cough drops and cigarettes, a flavor which Gerard was fond of. 

It tasted like skipping school when he faked illness. When his father was out on a business trip and his mother was in a better mood. He'd stay home, and while everyone was out, he'd get high off cough syrup and eat absolutely nothing. He'd smoke a whole fucking pack throughout the day. In the house. All just because he could. 

It was his version of freedom back then. Before he'd started skipping classes with Frank. 

It was bittersweet in its own way, but it was only fitting. 

Their kisses had their own flavor of sick. An aching, beautiful, fucked sense of sorrow.

It was all a blur. Time was mercury, shining and running across him. Captivation poison.

It felt like Frank was draining him, taking a piece of Gerard with each brush. By the end, he was left without much breath. 

Frank got up to leave once again, with one last drawn out kiss.

Gerard swore he heard Frank say something, but it was too quiet for Gerard to hear. Hard to tell if he was even meant to. But before he could ask Frank what he'd said, he had disappeared like a ghost. 

The bell tolled, telling Gerard his break was over. As if he hadn't been broken from his haze already.

The rest of the day ran by like water over a riverbed. Some of it soaked through his skin, but he was already too saturated with muddled memories to fully process anything. 

He tried to keep his head afloat with his after-school plans with Ray, but it was still a difficult feat. Especially when he couldn't quite talk to Ray in the remaining classes, even the ones they had together.

But as the last bell rang, everything was still okay. Okay as it could've been in that moment. 

Gerard was left wondering if Mikey had actually talked to Frank, or if he was putting it off like Gerard would've done. Maybe the he and Mikey were more alike than he thought. It didn't matter, though. It was out of his hands and he wanted to keep it there. 

It was made clear again, that he and Mikey were still very different, when Gerard and Ray met up to go across the river. 

They could see, out in the parking lot, a group of some of Mikey's friends. Pete was showing off his car, which was a big deal in sophomore year. Even if it was at least a decade old, even though he couldn't drive anyone around yet. At least not legally, but around the school rush hour you could usually get away with that sort of stuff.

It was still a big deal, and they seemed to be having a good time, gathered around the car. Gerard waved at Mikey, but didn't get a response. For a moment he was sad, but it passed quick. He seemed quite preoccupied, and probably didn't even notice. 

Even if he did, Gerard didn't blame Mikey if he was choosing to disassociate with him. 

"Do you know them?" Ray asked. 

"Everyone knows them." Gerard said. 

It was a joke, but it was kind of true. Even though Gerard never really knew anyone, no matter their social butterfly-ness, he'd heard things around school and from Mikey. And he knew that even Ray was aware of his social reclusion anyway.

"Not really," Gerard continued, "I only know Mikey. He's my brother."

Ray nodded.

It was a long and dreary walk to Paradox. It even began to rain toward the tail end of their commute to the comic shop. Even still, it was only a pitiful drizzle. 

It obscured their surroundings, giving it a texture that almost resembled gauze. It reminded Gerard of some of his old adventures. He always liked to go out to this old bus stop, the one that stopped running after labor day weekend for no reason, and just watch the rain. 

It always made the sky a bit more interesting, and he could stand under the overhang and read and draw without much interruption. Because no one had any reason to be there. Especially in the rain.

This wasn't that sort of situation, though. He was stuck under in the leaky sky for a while, until they had rushed all the way across the Passaic and to the shop. 

This wasn't like the old overhang, though. You couldn't watch and observe the sky as the wind made patterns of the rain and clouds. It was too hard to see outside from the shop. The dark grey outdoors contrasted by the brightly lit shop, drenched in full saturation.

Ray had wandered off already, but it took Gerard a few minutes to give up and go search for some issues of Kill Your Boyfriend. It was one of those things he'd always try to find when he went into a comic shop. He'd only been successful three times, but he'd only been able to purchase one issue so far. Last time he found one he didn't have, it was super fucking overpriced.

This time, he was equipped with a whopping twenty dollars. Maybe it was considered small change to some, but it was fucking gold to Gerard. He wasn't allowed to have a job until he'd graduated, so he didn't really have any way of making money. He tried commissions, but people at his school avoided him too much for that to pan out.

This comic money was a gift from his grandmother, who had a sixth sense for telling when Gerard was having a particularly shitty day. Even now that she was in Hawai'i, she'd known somehow.

Usually the two of them would go out for the afternoon. Drive a few towns over to where they had these really beautiful parks and walk about with a cup of fancy overpriced coffee. Sometimes they'd go to museums or just wander. It was the happiest he'd feel on a regular basis, but they couldn't do that right now.

She was on a vacation with her friends for some time, so she had sent him a card and told him to get some coffee and comics. It wasn't the same, but he smiled at the thought. She knew. She always knew, somehow.

He flipped through the shelves, looking for any issue of Kill Your Boyfriend, other than the third which he already had. His endorphins skyrocketed, so fast that he silently gasped, when he came across the first issue. It was the only issue on the shelf, the only copy at that, but Gerard was fucking thrilled.

He put it in his left hand and went off to find some other comics. He could feel the shit-eating grin wide across his face, shooting pain through his injuries, but he was fucking happy.

By the end, he wound up a clearanced collection of V for Vendetta, Daytripper, and a few Morrison Batman installments to add to his collection. It all came out to just under what he had: seventeen dollars and fifty-two cents. 

He could feel a smile returning. He could still get a very basic coffee with the rest of change, or maybe pick up some snacks at the 7-11 on the say home. Today was shaping up quite nicely.

He met up with Ray again. He was flipping through the featured shelves, when Gerard found him, holding a copy of Whiteout by his side. 

"Hey." Gerard said, trying not to spook him. 

He had the tendency to spook people because he was always quiet out of habit, keeping his footsteps kept at the volume of a dainty cat. He never liked the side effect of spooking people constantly, though, so he tried to avoid it as best as he could.

"Hi." Ray said, still looking through the volumes. "I don't know when you were planning on leaving, but we could stay and get coffee and read a bit until the rain lets up. It's supposed to stop around four."

Gerard didn't find the idea of walking home in the rain very appealing. And he didn't like the idea of ditching Ray here by himself, even if they'd made no plans to stay to a certain hour. He wanted to stick around. It was nice, and he felt genuinely happy for the first time since Frank had disappeared. 

He still had to get back before six o'clock, but he could make it back well before five if he left around four. 

"Sure." Gerard said.

Ray purchased his books, and they borrowed a few more for their stay, before heading over to the in-shop cafe. It was, thankfully, not overpriced coffee. This wasn't Barnes and Nobles or some shit like that.

For half an hour, they sat and sipped coffees while flipping through the paneled pages. Gerard, being the Grant Morrison fanboy he was, had opted for the second volume of his Doom Patrol run to pair with his black sugarless coffee. The novel was as good as he'd remembered it to be, and the coffee was nice and bitter, and he remained relatively happy.

Ray was reading through a copy of Asterios Polyp, while sipping his cinnamon-drenched latte. Gerard had never heard of the book, but it looked interesting. Like one of those more artsy, limited-run (or singular-run) ones: like Whiteout or Daytripper. 

He tried to asked Ray about it. He was just about to. But he spotted someone behind him, and the words halted at the back of his tongue.

He choked on his breath. His good mood vanished in a matter of milliseconds.

Frank stood, a few feet from the edge of the designated cafe-zone, stocking the shelves. 

Gerard's stomach lurched. He couldn't handle this. In the back of the school, it was safe. Because it was only them, and even still neither of them were quite there. It felt tragic as all hell, but he had no way of knowing if it was real or his imagination. 

They couldn't pretend here. At least, Gerard knew he couldn't.

This was public. They couldn't just sit alone and smoke and make out. They couldn't pretend that this was all alright. They couldn't do anything. If they dared to interact it would be beyond awkward. But Gerard wanted so much to do something. Anything.

Even if the thought made the blood drain from his veins.

"You alright?" Ray asked, putting down his finished book. 

Gerard snapped out of his trance. He knew it was his best option was to just pretend everything was alright. That nothing had ever happened. 

"Yeah." He said, maybe a little quickly. 

He could feel the nerves surfacing on his face. While he tried to hide them, the look of mild worry on Ray's face his efforts were all for nought.

He'd fallen out of practice over the past while, between skipping home and being too fucking out of it to react most of the time. He was usually so good about that sort of shit. 

Not in the same way as Mikey, but he could fake enough of the wrong emotion. He could convince people that whatever his face read was nothing more than a trick. Usually, but not today.

"Alright." Ray said, unconvinced. "We can go if you'd like."

"Yeah." Gerard repeated, drained of life. "I'm sorry."

And then Frank waved. It shot a million little needles into his heart, but he tried to keep his emotions entirely subcutaneous. 

Gerard gave a half-hearted wave back, wanting to keep things looking normal. But never in his life had Gerard overthought a simple wave so much. 

It was so strange. Like everything was alright. Like they had been talking, like normal, for the past few days. 

Like nothing ever happened. 

Even though Frank, as far as he knew, wasn't good enough of a liar to pull something like this off.

He wasn't sure if it made it better or worse. But before he could decide, he was out of there with Ray. In all honesty, he didn't want to think about it. Or about what his dumb ass would do if he had to stuck around the comic shop. Or what had even happened over the past few days.

But the second he stepped out the door, the creeping feeling shot right into his spinal fluid. 

Someone was watching him. 

It wasn't just the inkling, a ghost of a feeling. This was full, slap-you-in-the-face, intuition. 

He didn't really have anywhere to go. He wanted to step into a TARDIS and wormhole the fuck out of there, but he wasn't the doctor. He was Gerard. And he had nowhere to go but return to the shop or go home. 

So, he tried to keep up his best everything's-okay face, and carried on his walk back with Ray. 

"Are you sure everything's alright?" he asked.

It was tempting, to be a bit self-indulgent and spill a bit of his life out into the world. For someone other than himself to see. Someone he could trust, or at least who he though he could trust. 

And Ray wasn't like Mikey, the only other person he could imagine telling anything like this to. Ray was less intertwined with the other pieces of Gerard's life. He was unpredictable, but not in the same way as Mikey. He knew Ray wouldn't judge him. 

But he still didn't really know Ray enough to spill his guts entirely.

"I don't know." Gerard said. 

It wasn't quite honesty, but he knew complete honesty and him never mixed well in the first place. It was a start, of sorts. He never planned on making it to the finish line, but it was a start.

"Is it to do with Frank?" Ray asked. 

Gerard did a double-take, wondering how the fuck he knew. But his sleep-starved brain soon remembered that he wasn't the only one who could see Frank. Nor was he only other person who had been around at the time of Gerard's facial slip-up.

"Yeah." Gerard admitted. "We were, I don't know, something for like a week. And it was really good. But then he dropped off the face of the planet for four days and we still haven't talked. We just, I don't know-" 

He wasn't sure if he should spare Ray the details, not wanting to weird him out, and not knowing if he could trust Ray enough. Especially when Gerard was half-convinced that the events were nothing more than his own daydreams. 

"I just don't know what happened." Gerard said. 

"Huh." Ray said. "That is pretty fucking weird."

They could've talked more. About that or about something else. Gerard would've found it pleasant, but they had arrived at Ray's house. So they said their goodbyes as they walked up the brick path to his cottage-style home. 

Ray wished Gerard luck in his sleuthing, figuring out of what the hell happened. He promised things would work out eventually, determining that Gerard was a rad person. That, because of this title given by Ray, he was destined for a happy ending of some type. 

Gerard knew he couldn't keep that promise, but he thanked Ray anyway. Even though it was no real promise, it really did help in lifting his spirits. He didn't feel happy, but he felt a little vein of warmth crack through his dread-filled heart.

He wished Ray a general wish of luck as they parted ways. And once he was back on his own, he realized. For a moment, the creeping feeling had faded out. Some time during their walk, but that was no longer.

He noticed it, because now, it was back with full force. Just as heavy as it was that day, at the park. The same feeling, when he noticed the cloaked man on staring across the water at him and Frank. It filled him with terror.

Same terror as exiting the comic shop. 

He ran all the way home, not caring about the puddles soaking his shoes and slacks to the bone. 

He needed to leave.


	7. Dimmed Low Enough to Pay

I can't I can't Icant Icant IcantIcant. 

It's all he could think. His memory disc was broken. The words skipping and repeating over and over and over again.

I can't.

He snapped back into it. 

Gray box. Dark room

Cold. Concrete. 

Water puddled on the floor. 

His face was scraped. As were his elbows and knees and palms of his hands. 

Down to the bone and bleeding out on the floor. 

They stung, but they were mostly numb. Like someone had taken a burning menthol cream and rubbed it all over his skin. 

In some ways he was glad, but in some ways he wished he could feel the pain. To keep him from floating off. 

Because floating off would be incredibly dangerous. 

No, he needed to stay here.

He was holding something soft in his hands. 

A dove. 

No, a pigeon. It had to be. 

Emily.

What was she doing in here?

He held onto her like a precious stuffed animal. She was his only sense of something better in this place. Though, he felt guilty. He was probably the reason she was stuck here with him, in this concrete cage.

She shouldn't have been there.

She was so out of place, so simply innocent.

Not like Gerard or the gritty room or even Frank. She was an angel trapped in the deepest pits of hell. A horrific sort of outlier.

Frank was nowhere to be found, but Gerard knew. The water. He was all around.

A loudspeaker hummed over the linoleum concrete. 

It shook the pooled water. It vibrated though Gerard's corpse.

"Kill." It stated. 

The voice was crackled and gravelly from the processing. But it carried the same threatening tone. Cold. Never angry. Just bone-chilling.

"Kill." it repeated. 

Gerard knew what he had to do. What the voice was telling him to do. 

But he couldn't. This was his friend. And even if she weren't. She was a bird. Harmless, faultless. He couldn't.

"Kill." It repeated one last time. "Or you die and then I'll kill the little fucker myself."

The anger seeped through the loudspeaker this time. It burned Gerard's eyes like fire. But he couldn't.

He wouldn't.

He closed his eyes and waited for his fate, clutching the poor creature close to his chest. Like it was some way to save her.

He waited. Three, two,

One. 

His eyes opened. He wasn't in pain, but he lie in the center of his mattress. A black hole tore through the center of his chest. Like someone had taken a spike to it, after he'd been over-anesthetized. 

It was the same feeling of immediate withdrawal after Frank had left. Only it didn't fester the same. It just lingered. 

He glanced off the side of his bed to see the early ghosts of sunlight in the sky. 

His blood ran cold. In the center of the square of sun that carpeted his bedroom floor stood a shadow. 

But he blinked and it was gone, leaving Gerard thankful. It was only his post-nightmare imagination, playing tricks on him again.

He kicked the few sheets that remained stuck to his cold clammy body. Letting them fall to the floor in the same pile as the rest he'd kicked off in his sleep.

It left him even more freezing. But didn't like the way they felt on him, soggy and gross from his cold night sweats. 

He hoisted himself out of bed. His stomach lurching as the black hole took a second to recenter its gravity. His head was still spinning, as it usually did when he chose to stood up. But as he slowly came to, he realized that his mouth was flooding with a most awful tasting saliva, esophagus was bracing for impact. 

He ran on tiptoe across the hall and made it to the bathroom just in time to puke up a most terrible vomit. He'd vomited up pure bile before. Hell, he'd vomited up pure vile mixed with vodka, pure bile mixed with fizzy drinks, but this was by far the worst. Even more painful than fucking pizza. 

It was like his stomach had developed pox, for the sole purpose of scraping it out and sending it right up his esophagus. 

It was red, so fucking red that Gerard thought he was about to pass the fuck out. But he remained fully conscious, despite his wooziness. 

It really was a beautiful shade of red. And if it hadn't come from the inside of Gerard's fucking stomach, he would've loved to capture it in an empty bottle and put it up high on his bookshelf. Where the sun could beam through it, and drench his room is beautiful color. 

But it was his stomach that he had vomited up. It was most likely blood and bile and water. Fucking disgusting.

It wasn't the first time it had happened, but it was the first time that it had been accompanied by what seemed to be chunks of his stomach. And it had never been so dark before. 

The few other times were minor incidences, where his bile would have a streak of light pink mixed with whatever else was in there.

It didn't phase Gerard, though. He knew he wasn't dying or anything.

His stomach sure felt like it was collapsing in on itself, and he had just vomited up a decent portion of blood, but he was alright. 

He took a moment more to stare at the contents of his stomach, halfway breaking with reality, before he pulled himself off of the floor.

He rinsed his mouth out with water and Listerine. And flushed his stomach contents down the toilet. Like nothing had ever happened.

He contemplated taking an ibuprofen, but he decided it wasn't worth the risk of agitating his already damaged stomach. 

For some reason, he slept soundly that night. It was the best sleep he'd gotten in ages. Granted, it was only for a few hours, but it felt just like heaven.

He woke up, refreshed and somehow in a good mood. Even though he physically felt like shit, his brain was alright.

He wanted to skip breakfast like usual, but his stomach felt like it was collapsing in on itself. So, he opted for a little yogurt cup, in the hopes that it would be easy on his stomach. 

He knew that coffee was a bad idea, but coffee was non-negotiable. Especially if he was bothering to eat breakfast in the first place. Mikey gave him a weird look, knowing something was up, but neither of them exchanged a word as the two of them ate breakfast.

Today their father was sleeping in later, something he'd do from time to time. But they had to remain incredibly quiet, because if either of them woke him up, they were dead meat.

It didn't kill Gerard's curiosity, though. 

Mikey said he would talk to Frank, but Gerard wasn't sure that he wanted to know how it was going to be. It made things too finite, too stitched together. 

The loose ends were a comfortable space for Gerard to daydream. And he really needed those daydreams, because it was what gave those stupid fucking kisses most of their sweetness.

His curiosity festered throughout the course of breakfast, but he threw out his trash and took his bag and left. 

He didn't want to know the ending until he really had to. 

Outside, the cold air brushed his face. It seized his lungs and froze the residue vomit in his throat.

It possessed a numbing effect that Gerard always liked, the fresh air something he sorely missed in the summertime. The effect neutralized the acid of the bile, and made him feel normal for a moment.

With the first blast of cold air, he had become wonderfully frozen. 

But as he thawed, his mind began to race and become aware. 

Once again, the feeling came crawling in, under his skin. Someone was watching him. 

It had implanted itself under his skin, like a parasite that dragged on behind him ever since he'd had that first nightmare starring Frank Iero. 

It had started to become background noise. A subtle hum that made it feel like he was always in danger, but that this was simply everyday life from now on. As shit as it was. He could never really get used to it, but it had started feeling normal.

Instead of only feeling terrified, his mind wandered into what could be. All the way to school, he ran through the seemingly endless amount of possibilities. Thing which could present themselves when he saw Frank next. 

Or wouldn't. There were still two consistencies with each outcome, though. Either he and Frank would resume, or he and Frank would end.

They were stuck on pause for now. They had been ever since he'd disappeared. It was no fairytale, sure, but nothing more could go wrong for the time being.

But now things would change. He didn't know when, but he knew it would be soon.

The commute wasn't long enough to fully prepare. Gerard hadn't built a big enough reservoir of hypotheticals for his own liking, when he arrived.

But he was going to get his answer either way. And it wasn't going to be in any way he would've predicted. 

When he arrived to school, his coffee was beginning to kick his digestive system into motion. He scampered off to the bathroom, before his first class began. He didn't want to waste his escape time within the first few minutes of class.

He considered not going to the second-story one. Remaining nervous at the prospect of running into Frank. But it was, unfortunately, the best men's restroom the school had to offer.

And he never really used the other restrooms.

For comforts' sake, and for memories' sake, he chose the stall he'd found himself in during each of their stupid restroom encounters. 

He didn't notice it at first, still lost in his head, but he soon did. Hidden in the bottom corner of the back of the door the wall, there was a neon orange sticky-note pasted to the door. 

'i'll talk this time. sry.' it read. It looked like Frank's handwriting. Aged a few years for sure ,but unmistakably his. Gerard didn't know whether to laugh or to smile or to cry or what, but the first bell soon rang.

He couldn't do anything more. Not yet. He had a presentation to worry about. So he took the note back with him, and left for class.

Organic chemistry went fine. even if he was jittery from nerves half of the class. Nothing went wrong. And his nerves subsided some time after his turn came and went without mistake.

He and Ray chatted in their back-row seats, after Gerard was done with his presentation. Talking to Ray helped keep the presentation nerves subdued, until they wore off entirely. He wanted to thank Ray, but he still thought it would be strange to do so.

So he didn't. Not anywhere but inside his head. 

Even after the nerves had subsided, it was still nice. Talking to Ray. Even though it was only in the space between presentations, he felt real, and he felt happy enough. Distracted enough to be happy enough.

As was seeming to happen more and more often, they eventually arrived at the topic of nightmares. Gerard chalked it up to Halloween spirit, but he couldn't help but feel like he was giving off some weird I-wanna-talk-about-nightmares vibe. 

But he didn't really mind. Not anymore, and because this was Ray.

It was actually fun. Recounting his tales of nightly horror, in a way that felt more like storytelling than anything. He doodled images drawn from his nightmares in between stints of their conversation. 

He didn't really mind that Ray could see him drawing. He didn't stare, like some people would. He didn't complain about the style, or the content, or the fact that he was drawing. Somehow, it was normal. Comforting, surprisingly.

He even pitched Gerard an idea. Maybe he should write a story with pictures and shit. All about his nightmares. Like little vignettes, as part of a series.

It was a strange idea, but Gerard loved it. It just felt so very him.

He chided himself for not giving Ray the time of day sooner. 

The two probably could've been really good friends throughout high school, but now they were nearing the end of their stay. It was sad to see that he had passed someone like Ray. Someone who would've really brightened his days, and they could raised a special kind of hell together.

It was sad, but at least he had given Ray the time of day. It was late, but it made the present moment a blast.

They were having a hell of a time, coming up with additions to the horror-shows. They passed the notebook back and forth, drawing more and more nightmarish creatures that fit the original cast. Each was given an outlandish name and continuity points. What could kill them, what their purpose for inflicting harm was, what they needed to survive.

It made the monsters less scary. It was actually fun. They were nothing more than works of fiction, trapped between pages of cheap notebook paper.

By the time organic chemistry was over, he and Ray had covered six of his notebook pages. Scribbled up character designs and scratched out story lines. His heart's lead felt like it had been replaced his helium. The fear had mostly dissolved into nothing. Only pen on paper.

He knew it wouldn't stick around for too long, but it didn't matter. Even if it was temporary, Gerard was happy. 

And he wasn't going to be left with his head for too long anyway. Thankfully. 

Lunch was soon approaching, and he'd be out to find answers. Out to his rock-wall home. Out to Frank, and wherever they'd end up.

Supposedly. At least they were going to talk, and for some reason Frank had apologized. Gerard didn't know why. But they would be. Supposedly.

He stepped foot outside of the claustrophobic school building. The cold air once again drained, then rejuvenated, his lungs. He felt optimistic. Like this was a new beginning. The feeling was strange but welcome. 

The fall leaves had mostly turned to a dead grey-brown, falling to the ground, by now. The ones that stayed were clinging to dear life, mottled red and black shapes screaming in the breeze. The heart of picture-perfect fall was coming to a close. 

It was death in a tarot card all around.

Halloween, probably Gerard's favorite piece of fall, was on the horizon. He was far from saddened by the sight of the dying leaves and the barren trees, a sign of good times to come. It had an almost corpse-like look to it all, especially where the trees grew taller and more gnarled. 

Out by the back of the school, by his birds.

No one was there yet, but Gerard wasn't surprised. He'd arrived there early, and Frank wasn't one to always be exactly on time anyway. Normally, he'd be anxious. But his nerves were kept from jumping out by the cold air. And from seeing his bird friends, safe and sound among the soft rotting leaves. His nightmares were still just that.

His daydreams were just that. This was real life. He just needed to remember that, cling to it to remember himself. And he'd remain here, alright.

He watched the birds for a while. He was relatively calm, but his hands too shaky with excitement to even consider drawing them. 

He tried over and over again like a revolving windmill to catch enough cold air in his lungs to freeze his nerves to stop his hands from shaking. But it was never enough. 

All he could do was watch the birds, and be thankful that they were safe. They weren't about to have their life snuffed out by some strange kidnapper. Or Gerard. Especially not Gerard.

Watching them was too calming, though. And between the cold air and the calm atmosphere, he began to slip away. He'd almost gone entirely, but Frank finally appeared.

He was pulled back to Earth, as Frank rounded the corner. 

He walked hastily and stiffly, almost like he had each time they'd meet to kiss in silence. Only his steps had a weight this time, slamming against the ground like he was running. Only he wasn't 

He could feel his heartrate climbing now. The atmosphere and his quick-fix happiness wasn't enough anymore. He needed to figure shit out with Frank, but he didn't want their fates to be sealed.

He just wanted it to all be alright, this one little piece of his life that could go right.

He sat down with a quick right angle. Abrupt and slightly robotic. Something wasn't right, but Gerard knew that. Even before he'd walked over here all on edge. 

Something wasn't right, and that's why they hadn't been talking.

"Hey." Frank said. 

His voice carried a boat of emotions. Ones which Gerard had never seen nor heard before. Tossing and turning the small fishing boat in tumultuous waves, as short as the singular syllable of the word was. It drew Gerard into its waters, but he refused to show it.

"Hey." Gerard said. 

He didn't know where to begin, or if he should begin. Or even if he could begin. Because the nerves were eating his throat and stomach raw, like a most awful ulcer. Threatening to shoot a dose of bile strait into his lungs. 

Thankfully, he didn't have to make the choice. 

"Sorry." Frank began. "I thought I weirded you out or something. That's why I disappeared."

"I thought it was because I weirded you out." Gerard returned. "Because I was acting all paranoid and shit last time."

His veins were crawling. Even though Frank had filled a needle with pure serotonin and shot it into his veins, Gerard's own mind filled its own needle with unease. 

It was like they hadn't been along since early last week.

He tried to convince himself that he was being paranoid. He always seemed to be, after all. 

And his paranoia had been on the incline recently, with the almost constant feeling like he was being watched by someone other than his parents. 

He reminded hi self that people didn't always talk about shit. That Gerard wasn't special in leaving out the less romantic pieces of the story. That's all Frank was probably doing. Because it was all done, and it didn't change anything at the end of it all.

"I thought you were acting all paranoid and shit because I was weirding you out." Frank said. 

He was laughing now, his body relaxed to a more normal state of Frank. Voice lighter and freer without that heavy untitled emotion, further elevated by his apparent amusement. It melted his worries away.

And Gerard had to admit, it was quite funny. In hindsight, of course. He'd never want to live through that type of uncertainty again, but it was funny now. 

Especially because he thought he knew everything when it came to circumstances like this. He was certain that he'd weirded Frank out. But no.

"No, I've just had this really creepy feeling recently," Gerard said, still refusing to take on a serious tone, "Like someone's been watching me. Like, someone I don't know."

Though he was refusing to take it seriously for the moment, saying it out loud made his chest go cold. It made it realer than he had intended, even if he said it all with a lighthearted tone. 

"Really?" Frank asked. "I've had the same feeling. It's fucking creepy, especially when I'm walking home by myself and shit, I keep thinking someone's following me."

His voice was too serious for Gerard's liking. It left him clambering for some remaining bit of laughter, to take the uneasy feeling away. Even if it was a different one, one that was beyond the walls of Gerard's own mind, it was still scary.

"Fuck." Frank added. "Now whoever it is, they know where I live."

He must've seen the color drain from Gerard's face, because he tried to take on a more lighthearted tone. But it wasn't fooling Gerard. It only scared him more, becasue it meant that Frank was scared too. He knew something was wrong. It wasn't some inkling. And he wasn't paranoid like Gerard.

"Shit. I thought I saw someone this morning." Gerard said, piecing it together. 

He hadn't connected the feelings like he was being followed to anything else that had been happening, but it made sense. As much as he didn't want it to. But there was still some comfort in knowing what could be, and that maybe he wasn't so crazy after all.

"I woke up and saw the shadow of someone by my window, but then they were gone." he continued. "I thought I was just seeing things."

"Shit." Frank said. 

You could tell he didn't really know what to say. That his mind was chock-full of concepts, held back through a filter of finding words. Gerard knew that look very well. It was a very common one. And Gerard understood.

What mattered was that they were okay, in one sense of the word. And they knew now that they could be scared. That this was all real, and that they weren't okay in just about every other sense.

"Yeah." he said. "We could start walking home together. You know, until we kind of have to part."

It wasn't like there was much that they could do.

All they had was this feeling like they were being watched. Mikey would just think he was being paranoid and shrug it off. His parents would give him shit for making up stories again. Frank's parents, well Gerard didn't know shit about them. But based on the fact that Frank hadn't proposed any solution relating to them, he wad given the notion that they wouldn't be of much help either. 

All they had was each other. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, they were being paranoid. 

And maybe they were. Hopefully, they were. But they knew that they weren't.

"Sure." Frank said, and it soothed Gerard's worries enough. "Yeah, that's a good idea. Thanks."

The bell rang, and they knew that they would have to part ways for now. At least they would be in school, a place where they wouldn't have to wander around alone without a crowd. At least Gerard hadn't had the creeping feeling in school, and he hoped by that logic Frank hadn't either. 

They would be okay for now, until they saw each other again.

Before they parted ways, they shared a good-bye kiss. It wasn't drawn out, but it was rejuvenating and intoxicating all at once. Resurrective. 

It was heavenly, but Gerard couldn't help but notice something that scared him. Frank, his kiss, tasted of sour apples and cigarettes. Sweet, just like before. But never during their time away.


	8. Away

The clock on the wall ticked slowly by, the second hand seeming to keep pace with each second beat of his heart. 

He tapped the rubber eraser at the end of his pencil against the desk. Keeping the noise only loud enough that he could hear it, from his own solitary desk. Tapping out the seconds from the molasses clock, until he'd be able to escape into the next class, where he could piss away his time having fun with Ray instead.

As with every Friday, every minute felt agonizing. Even though he knew that he'd miss his weekdays dearly, as he always did by the time the weekend was upon him. The instant gratification portion of his brain wanted anything to escape the boredom of right now.

They weren't even doing anything in class. The lesson had been finished for a good ten minutes, and the teacher was just clamoring on with one of his anecdotes. It was one he'd told before, one which he'd probably go on to tell a million more times, but he didn't care.

He was biding his time, making sure to hit that 'good teacher' lecture minute mark. And no one else bothered to care. They were just happy they didn't have to absorb any of the material being thrown their way.

Gerard wished he didn't care as much, but he could feel his eyelids growing heavy. And though everyone in the room knew the purpose of this anecdote, everyone also knew that it was commonplace for this teacher to whack your desk with the lecture stick he kept at the front of his room, if you did fall asleep.

He knew he'd probably panic because of his ever-increasing hypervigilance, were it to happen. So he dug his nails deep into his palms, over and over again, trying to keep himself awake.

He'd been able to keep conscious easily during the first half-hour, revisiting the sketches and notes of nightmarish stories he and Ray had been working on. In the first half-hour he'd messily penciled out six notebook pages of their story, each leaf serving as its own hypothetical book page. 

But his sleepless nights were catching up to him once again. He'd been having the same nightmare about Emily over and over. Each one would be ever so slightly different; one time he was Frank, one time Frank stood beside him as a motionless statue, one time Emily's feathercoat had been streaked with a black line. 

But each time he woke up in the same exact state, black hole collapsing everything down into his chest. 

Some nights he'd try to just stay awake, terrified of having that same dream again. He knew he would, the moment his eyes' curtains closed. It never worked, though. And Gerard was left cursing himself for ever trying. 

If only he hadn't let it keep him from sleep, or at least trying to get some fucking rest, he could be wide awake and enjoying the pointless anecdotes of his teacher tight now.

But that wasn't his case. He clawed at his hand and drew, gripping his pencil just as tight as his palm. Until the bell finally rang. 

His hands were red and raw and tingling with a hesitant numbness, but he still shoved everything into his bag and booked it the moment he could. The moment no one would notice him. Even though he was beginning to not care.

It was still early in the day, but he'd have Ray in the next class to keep him awake. They could fuck around with storylines until lunch, where they would part ways and Gerard would go see Frank. 

They could get coffee then, at least Gerard would, because fuck did he ever need a caffeine fix. He could be kept on the ventilator of Frank's breath. His kiss, and conversation, and the stupid little way he held his cigarette like he was trying to look tough. But that wouldn't last him through part two of the school day.

Outside, students ran about the halls. Gerard managed to get to organic chemistry with only a few instances of people suddenly finding he wasn't a ghost: by either being spooked by the sudden realization of his presence or by bumping right into him. 

He scanned the room for Ray, but he was nowhere to be found. He sighed and took a seat where he had always sat, in the back corner by the rolled up posters that were fraying at the edges and stained with chemicals and smoke. He'd have to go class one alone, and remain conscious, somehow.

But he was afraid enough to keep himself awake. His mind couldn't' help but jump at the thought that whoever, or whatever, was following him and Frank had got Ray. He tried to quell his fears, but the notion was still there. He didn't know why they would go after Ray, other than by association, but he didn't know why they'd be after him and Frank either.

He took out his notebook, preparing to spend another class drawing, this time kept awake by freaking out. But Ray sat down next to him. Gerard jumped in his seat, still on edge and not having realized when Ray had entered. But it was subtle enough where no one but Gerard noticed. 

"Hey." Ray said.

"Hi." Gerard returned. "You're later than usual."

For a second, he wished he could take it back. He still hadn't grown used to talking to people, finding it easier to make quick introductory conversations with statements. And that often came in the form of observations Gerard would make about people, at the whim of his head. It didn't always make for proper conversation.

"Yeah." Ray said. He seemed unaffected by Gerard's observation, making Gerard relieved. "My brother changed my alarm. He was home from college this weekend, and I forgot to change it."

"Hm." Gerard said of amusement. "Brothers are strange beings, aren't they."

"Yeah." Ray said with a smile. "You have?- I always forget you and Mikey are brothers."

He opened his mouth to say something, but before Gerard could respond, Ms Jessik began her lesson. 

He and Ray spent the class flipping between working on the graphic novel and jotting down the notes from the board. The rest of the school day went on without a hitch. No falling asleep, no nightmares, not even sticks hitting desks. 

It felt like Gerard was in control of his life. Like this was the first time really ever that he had some control over it all for more than a day or two. Even if he was falling asleep and the feeling of being stalked hung around him like a cloud. He felt relatively normal, in a good way.

He met Frank out back by the stone wall, to share conversation over a cigarette. Just as they always did, before departing from the school grounds. 

Gerard's pigeon friends had grown accustom to Frank by now, no longer scattering whenever he'd near their flock. Frank had even begun to grow fond of the birds. Enough where Gerard couldn't bear to divulge the contents of his recurring nightmare.

But he didn't really need to. He had his stories and his horror-talk with Ray to drain enough of the pressure it put on his brain. 

In those fleeting moments behind the school, he liked to think he could float away. Because it was safe there. Even if he felt that creeping feeling crawling up the vertebrae of his spine from time to time. It was safer than he felt most of the time, even if he was happy. 

"Hey," Frank said, once their cigarette was beginning to dwindle. "Do you have anywhere you need to get to soon?"

"No," Gerard said, even though he kind of did. 

Frank could be unpredictable with his view of time, and Gerard was still grounded. So, he needed to get back before his parents returned. But the day was young and his parents stayed out later on Fridays. Not to mention, Gerard was curious as hell. And he wanted any reason to stay around Frank, as long as he could.

So there was no thinking about it. It was entirely worth it.

"Cool." Frank said with that mischievous grin of his once again gracing his face. "Because I have my car back. We can go somewhere fun."

"You have a car?" Gerard asked. 

Even though it wasn't uncommon for people to have cars by now, being seniors and all, he'd never seen Frank driving a car. But then again, he hadn't hung around with Frank that much. At least not before their meeting in the second-floor restrooms, and that had only been a few weeks ago.

"Yeah." Frank said. "I got the keys taken away for a while, though. My parents found out I had piled up so many retakes."

Gerard laughed. Maybe it was a little cruel, but it was quite funny. He'd never thought that Frank would be found out. He seemed to be a such a professional rebel child.

"Ah, man." Gerard said. "Thank sucks. So where to?"

"No fucking clue." Frank said. 

Gerard didn't know what he had been expecting, with the last time they'd adventuring it was to nowhere in particular. 

"Alright." Gerard said.

He wasn't like Frank, though. The moment he realized Frank had no plan of where to go, Gerard's mind began turning. Trying to figure out a place that he hadn't been to for a while, or even somewhere he'd just heard of. 

Somewhere that was far enough from anywhere his parents could be, but somewhere that wasn't entirely unfamiliar. And somewhere that Frank would also enjoy.

"There's a beach I know" he said, after raking through his memories a few times over. "It's awfully crowded in the summer, but since it's the offseason it'll be almost vacant. I know a really cool place there that I can show you."

"Sure." Frank said. "Cool"

It was a picturesque little beach that had stretched itself between the surrounding rocks and trees that made up most of the shoreline. The beach itself had its fair share of rocks and trees, but that was one of the things which made it such a beautiful beach. It was more than an endless beige plain. Dotted with nature's rock sculptures and a gnarled old trees no one had the heart or guts to remove. 

He remembered the space being some ways down the shore, a kind of pocket within the nature, his getaway space back when his family would go there every summer. They hadn't gone in a while, but the memory was still strong within his mind, being one of the few untainted ones.

It had its bittersweetness, as everything did as a decidedly jaded teen. But it hadn't been infected with all the strong negativity in his life. It was the escape from it all.

Of course, his family hadn't gone in years. Not since his father lost the job he'd had when Gerard was a little kid. 

His father job-hopped for some time, and they never really had less money than they'd had before, it was just the hours. The vacations to the seaside disappeared as everyone grew more bitter and time ran short. Not that his father's temper had ever been the best, nor had his mother's, but each grew worse as the years passed.

For all Gerard knew, the town had uprooted the trees and rocks in favor of a more traditional, tourist-friendly beach. He hoped they hadn't. But he didn't know. 

Though that was somewhat the point of Frank's aimless adventuring in the first place.

The beach was a quick drive, at most half an hour from the school. It was a mostly conversation-less drive, airwaves occupied by the Thursday CD Frank had put on. He and Gerard sang along, but sometimes Frank would get too into it and forget he was driving the car, leaving Gerard singing alone the majority of the time. But he didn't really mind.

And Gerard didn't mind. He usually hated singing around people. Even just singing like this, nonsensically to a track. But Frank had become someone he could be around and simply be. Gerard would even let Frank watch him draw, most times.

The CD was still running as they pulled into the parking lot. They were still smiling, and Gerard was still happy. He was so fucking happy. 

It hadn't fully hit him until he looked out, panning across cold and silent beach. The only sound came from the waves, the wind, and the distant traffic of the turnpike. It looked the same as it did when it was cold. There was no fall, no leave or anything, just a grey haze that had a romantic sort of melancholy.

Gerard took Frank's hand and led him to the spot. They were in no rush, even though Gerard knew he might face an interrogation if he wasn't home before his parents. He didn't mind. He could lie, and this was so incredibly worth it. 

They slowly made their way to and through a large cluster of rocks, until they reached a little alcove. It was hidden from most of the world. They could only be found if someone were looking for them, and if that someone knew where the little alcove was. This could be their own pocket universe. Just for now.

It was more romantic than he remembered, almost like something out of a movie. It was also away from prying eyes. Which was nice, considering he could finally shake the feeling of being followed. It was like a massive weight off of his shoulders. He was back home, and he was back with someone who made the world feel like home. 

They sat side by side on a small boulder. It was cold, but it warmed just like the stone wall behind the school always did. Frank held a cigarette between his teeth and searched his pockets for a lighter. 

"Need a light?" Gerard asked, and Frank nodded. 

He took a long drag and let it slowly escape his lungs. Gerard watched with fascination as the smoke was whisked away in the wind.

"So what is this place anyway?" Frank asked. 

"My old safe haven." Gerard said. "From when I was a kid."

"Ah. You've got good taste." He smiled, with another drag of the cigarette.

"Guess I do." Gerard chuckled. "I haven't been here in a while, but it's even nicer than I remember."

"We should meet here, on Saturday. And Sunday." Frank muttered, leaning his head against Gerard's shoulder. "And every day. It's so pretty here."

They looked out as the waves crashed onto shore. The sky was a late October blue. Deep blue, despite being faded away by the grey clouds. Frank's side pressed warm against his. The world around them drowned in the ocean. Gerard could stay here forever, their hands intertwined. Like he would never want to let go.

"Could I have a drag?" Gerard asked.

"You're gonna get lung cancer." Frank warned.

"Fuck you, hypocrite." Gerard said humorously.

Frank smirked, the insolent creature he was, and held the cigarette in his hand. Like he was seriously contemplating whether giving Gerard the cigarette was a good idea.

Finally, Frank passed him the cigarette and Gerard took a long, much-needed drag. 

This place, as good as it had been to him as a kid, carried a heaviness he hadn't realized. It hadn't even existed when he was a child. The protective spell had worn off, sending dead bits of what had stuck to the barrier to join with the rocks and the grains of sand.

But it still felt like home. More than his real 'home' ever would. He stared out at the sea. The sunlight scattered across the violent waters. Breaking up into a million little glittering pieces.

He could feel Frank breath smoke onto his neck, the tendrils curling around him and tickling the small hairs on his neck. It sent shivers down his spine so intense that it spasmed ever so slightly. 

"Fuck." He cursed, giggling and blushing. 

He'd always wondered what that would feel like, and he was glad he had found out. It was like the space before a passionate kiss, the anticipation sending his heart for a flurry. 

His stomach stirred with that same anticipation. The secluded location killed his inhibitions enough that he didn't have to worry about people watching. It was safe here.

Gerard put his cigarette out and pulled Frank in by the scarf and kissed him. Intensely. This wasn't behind the school, where there was still the off-chance that someone might find them, someone they knew. 

Here, they were strangers to the area. And here, there was a near-zero percent chance of being found by anyone. Stranger or not. Here, he could throw away the cares that dragged him down. He could let himself be hungry, so fucking hungry as he was, and try to satiate it as Frank did the same.

It was like the more they got, the more they wanted. A quick and spiraling addiction, minus the dejection and the eventual tolerance. This one just led them higher and higher until they had to break for air.

Frank smirked between gasps for air, pleased with himself. Gerard rolled his eyes at his arrogance, but he couldn't shake the hunger. Even as he gulped down oxygen for the next round, he wanted the hunger to stay. 

When their breaths had steadied enough to not suffocate, Frank kissed Gerard again. This time it was even more intense. He ran his hands through Frank's messy jet-black hair, already fucked thrice over from their kissing. 

Frank's hands held on tight around the meeting of Gerard's shoulderblades and spine. His legs on either side of Gerard, like if he let go he would be sent out to sea. His lips traveled, though, moving from his lips to his neck. He quickly found a sweet spot just below the corner of his jaw. 

It sent shivers of warmth down every limb in his body, leaving Gerard a mess. Just as he wanted to be. Matching Frank almost exactly, with his fucked-up hair and pinkish blush.

Frank leaned over, putting his cigarette out quickly on a nearby rock. The shift sent a jolt through Gerard, and he had to trap his sounds in his mouth to not be heard. They weren't intentional, and this was, technically, still public space. Even if they were hidden.

This was still only making out. 

He pulled Frank against him again, kissing him like it was a miracle cure for his life. It really did feel that way, as ran his hands against Frank's chest, his waist, his hips. Pulling him even closer as the waves came crashing in. His heart beat faster and faster. So fast he thought it might explode and send fragments of his ribcage to join the shells in the sand.

It was pure euphoria. Infinite. 

Even though he wanted more, more, more.

"Fuck" Gerard cried, no longer able to contain himself.

The pit of his stomach was bubbling with a fury, delightful but greedy. It always wanted more, more, more. The little sounds and motions Frank would make fed the greed, but Gerard knew. This place was nice, it was safe. But there was no more here.

"Do you want to go back to my place?" he asked.

He knew that if the answer was yes, the car ride there would be torture. But this was a fucking beach. No way in hell were they going to just fuck then and there. Even though every irrational part of his brain was telling him it was a good idea. 

Frank nodded and kissed Gerard one last time. It wasn't as hungry as the last had been, because he too knew. 

He got up, then helped Gerard up, before sprinting off to the car. It was like he was racing Gerard. 

Gerard would've made a joke about it if he weren't so eager to get the fuck home. He ran as fast as his legs could carry him, scared of being seen in the state he was in but also just filled to the brim with adrenaline.

The ride home was hell, but it lasted shorter than Gerard had anticipated. Frank must've been speeding the whole way, because they were there in twelve minutes flat. Not that Gerard noticed, too preoccupied with his mind which was continuously flipping between anxiety and lust.

Lust won out, as he wished it to. 

Gerard unlocked the door as quick as he could and the clambered back to Gerard's room, slamming the door shut behind them. They began making out, but Gerard decided that they were safer off locking the door. Just in someone same home unexpectedly early.

It was a quick ordeal, though. Only a sprint to and from where Frank stood, center of his old carpet.

He crashed back into Frank, and they wasted no more time. They couldn't. At least Gerard couldn't last much longer. With each slight brush of their hips against each other, he came just a little closer to the end. Frank seemed to be lasting a bit longer, but Gerard could tell with his breaths getting ever shorter that he wasn't anywhere near immortal.

They fumbled onto his unmade bed, the sheets still smelling like his nightmares. But the odor was being quickly replaced with the scent of Frank, of the mix of their sweat. 

Gerard was the one this time, with his legs on either side of Frank. He sat there, waiting for Frank to give him a sign to go. 

"Are you alright?" Frank asked. He sounded all concerned, which humored Gerard.

"Yeah." Gerard said, "Shit. Yeah, I'm fine. I just-" he began. "What should I do."

Frank brought him in for another kiss. It was just as sweet as it was lustful, leaving his heart in a flurry.

"You could start-" he said, between kisses. "with the shirt. And from there, we can go as far as you'd like."

He slowly peeled Frank's shirt off. The whole time he could feel his heartbeat in his fingertips. He wondered if Frank could feel it to, but he was so close his his actual heart that there was no doubt.

He went down for another kiss before taking off his own shirt, tossing it to the other side of the room. 

He felt so naked. It was strange, how he didn't mind it. His head was too clouded with lust to be all that embarrassed by it. 

For a moment it bothered him, but that care was flung into the far reaches of the galaxy with another kiss. He could feel so much of his skin against Frank. Not only his arms and nose and lips, but his chest. He could feel Frank's heartbeat, his breath, all against his own.

He was strangely soft. Strangely and wonderfully soft. 

And beautiful. A fucking masterpiece. 

It ached his heart and his guts alike.

Each kiss was never just that. With Gerard straddling Frank, each time either of them moved, there was friction between their hips. Each time grew more insatiably unbearable, until neither of them could take it anymore.

Gerard, with Frank's help, switched places with Frank. They continued making out, but only for a moment more.

"I can't fucking-" He said, trying to speak without letting the noises in his throat escape. "Just fucking do it already. Please, just." 

"Are you sure?" Frank asked. 

Gerard vehemently nodded. He knew what he wanted. He wanted everything.

Frank seemed to remember something, though. Something forgotten, that had slipped through the cracks until now.

"Shit." he cursed. "Are you clean?"

Gerard nodded again. He'd never fucked or been fucked or anything remotely like that. But he was growing worried that Frank had changed his mind. That Frank was beginning to regret this.

"Yes." he said. "I'm clean, and I'm certain. Are you?"

"Yeah." Frank said, leaning down to kiss Gerard. "I just forgot."

They kicked off their jeans, leaving them pressed together in nothing but their boxers. It was so euphorically overwhelming. The only thing between him and Frank a thin sheet of fabric. He could feel almost every single inch of him, warm and soft and fucking incredible.

It was so much that, when he pressed back down again, Gerard involuntarily let loose a moan. He clapped his hand over his mouth, embarrassed. But he knew that changed nothing. And he knew it was silly, because was fucking turned on by the little noises Frank made. But the embarrassment still coated him face, joining the lust. 

"Fuck." Frank moaned, joining him. "Gerard, it's alright. It's fucking heaven. No one can hear but me and you. You don't have to be embarrassed. You sound so fucking pretty."

He was a little abashed about the compliment, wishing he could find himself the space to do the same to Frank. But it felt strange to do it now. Not yet, at least. He just kissed Frank. 

He knew how fucking wonderful Gerard thought he was. 

They kissed once more before they peeled the final layer of clothes off. They boxers were blotched with moisture, but neither of them cared. Neither of them could think to care. 

Gerard's heart pounded even harder with anticipation as he handed Frank the tiny bottle of lube he kept around. Leftover from a science project, but he'd kept it around. For personal use, and in hopes of some version of today.

This version of today was near perfect.

He turned onto his stomach, and Frank asked him one last time if he was certain. He was certain, though. He fucking loved it when he'd done it himself. He could only imagine what someone else, something more than his own fingers could do. What it would feel like to actually some with something pressed against the sweetest spot of all. 

With the intimacy of Frank. 

He waited, filled with anticipation, as Frank coated his fingers, and then the very entrance of Gerard's ass with a bit of lube. 

And finally, he pushed in. It wasn't perfect, but Gerard knew it wouldn't be. Not yet. 

It would take a little while, but soon enough he'd found the sweet spot. It sent Gerard collapsing in on himself, fucking into the mattress. He wanted so badly to just jack himself off, but he knew he'd come in a matter of seconds if he dared to.

He wanted to draw this out. Far longer than a few seconds. 

He wanted to be able to feel Frank, filling him up perfectly. 

He would wait until that could be reality.

Frank continued to move his fingers, becoming more skillful as they continued. Stretching and occasionally brushing against the spot again. But never enough to make Gerard come on the spot. But Gerard could feel his stamina wearing thin, pressing against Frank's fingers on instinct to bring himself closer.

"Alright." Gerard said, collapsing to the mattress once again. He wasn't entirely certain if he was prepared all the way, but he needed to be. "I'm good. Please. I just want to feel you."

He pressed against Frank. Pressed his ass into Frank's crotch because he needed something. He still refused to jack off out of fear of coming immediately. But he needed something. And fuck, was he hot and hard and the mere idea sent Gerard reeling. 

But he held on. 

Frank prepared himself quickly, asking Gerard once again if he was certain, before he pressed in. It was just the tip, but it felt so much better than his fingers ever had. Than Frank's fingers ever had. 

Frank let out a quiet moan. It was almost high-pitched in tone, but it was fucking hot. Gerard let out another moan, but he was able to control the volume this time. He couldn't set off his neighbors, even if they seemed to never hear his family's fights. He didn't want to risk it.

This moment was too beautiful to destroy. To addictive to leave uncompleted. 

He wanted more. More, more, more. 

He pressed further against Frank, letting his dick tear into him. It wasn't horribly painful, though. Only slightly, and Gerard liked it. 

Frank seemed a bit unsure about not going overly easy on Gerard at first. But he seemed to get the message soon enough. Gerard didn't like easy.

He liked the excitement and the pain and. Everything.

And so did Frank. Not in the same way, but after they had figured out how to continue face to face, he went fucking wanton when Gerard would pull his hair. Or dig his nails into his shoulderblades. 

He was still cautious, but he relaxed the more time passed. Finally fucking Gerard hard enough where he hit his spot. Fucking crashing into it, and it was both everything and nothing Gerard had imagined. It was fucking perfect. He was so fucking warm, and strangely soft and tender, but simultaneously rough enough to send Gerard to the edge. 

He didn't even have to jack himself off. He could feel the orgasm rising in his stomach quick.

He wanted it to last longer, but he wanted so badly to reach his peak. And Frank was seeming to reach his end, the noises that fell from his mouth and the facial expressions gracing his face growing more pornographic by the moment.

He could feel his stomach muscles tensing, as Frank pounded into him harder and harder. Faster and faster. Until he collapsed onto Gerard. A warmth filled Gerard's insides.

He fucked Gerard slower now, as the warmth continued to fill his ass. But his face and the noises he made as he rode out his orgasm were so fucking beautiful that it didn't matter.

He came all over his stomach, his dick remaining entirely untouched. He fucked the air, and only as he rode it out did he touch himself. It was the most intense feeling he'd had, of this sort. Of this simple and so fucking intense pleasure. 

It seemed to keep streaming. Frank helped jack him off as he rode out his orgasm, letting Gerard just writhe in pleasure. 

It was the most fucking sinful piece of heaven he'd tasted. 

And it was over. But the air of heaven still hung around.

It was no longer so sinful, but it wasn't pure either.

They lie there, pressed together, in their own mess. In their own masterpiece.

Gerard wiped the sweat-soaked hair from Frank's face. His eyes glittered in the light of the setting sun, streaming through his curtains. 

He looked like sex, so fucking hot and exhausted. A calm silence consumed them. He could lay here forever. He wanted to lay here forever. It was more complex than the fucking. Not self-indulgent, but just as lovely. Maybe even more.

And though he knew that the world still awaited, outside his door, it could wait another hour. Or as long as he could get.

The longer he remained, the more Gerard melted into his bed. The place of bad memories had been tainted by Frank. Seeping into his covers like poison into the threads of his bedsheets. Into Gerard's skin. 

The world was warm and safe in his embrace. His arms wrapped loosely around Gerard, like a shield.

His breath was so small, so unintimidating. He found it funny, how this guy who had been pounding into him only a matter of minutes ago was now looking all cute and tiny. His breath small and silent from his nose as he fell asleep. As Gerard fell asleep too.

Everything felt so surreal. A false sense of safety in the aftermath. But it felt so fucking safe. 

The sounds of the world drowned out. 

Until Mikey returned.

"Hey, Gee! Guess what I got?", Mikey called out.

"Uhm." he began. He was fucked. The false sense of safety disappeared in a snap

"Pizza!" he yelled back, his voice nervous. "Ness had some leftovers! But mom and dad are gonna be back any minute, so you've gotta get it soon!"

Gerard didn't know what to do. He was still naked, and he couldn't just leave Frank here. If he woke up, he could make noise, or worse wander out naked only to find Mikey standing there.

But Mikey knocked on his door, because whenever he brought back extra pizza he knew Gerard wanted a bit of is. He did, he just didn't know how to go about it.

Mikey knocked again. "You alright?" he asked. "You want the pizza?"

Frank stirred, though. And before Gerard could say anything he muttered something unintelligible.

"Frank?" Mikey asked. "Oh shit, sorry" Mikey said, finally getting it.

"No, what?" Frank asked groggily. "I want some pizza."

Gerard was freaking out, because Mikey knew. He fucking knew. But he didn't seem to care, beyond the awkward factor. But he couldn't help but burst out laughing at Frank. He didn't seem to get what was so funny, still groggy from sleep.

Gerard pulled on some clothes and went to get some pizza. For him, and for Frank. Because he was already done for.

He thanked Mikey for the pizza, but he dipped back into his room quickly. His parents had returned.

"Hey, Gerard." Mikey said through the door. "Wait until they're inside and busy. Then Frank can leave through the window. They won't notice."

Gerard wondered for a minute why Mikey knew this, but he wasn't all that surprised. He'd snuck out on many occasions. He was just happy Mikey wasn't giving him shit for sleeping with a guy. That nothing seemed to have changed between the two of them.

It was like a massive weight had been lifted off of his chest, even if he now had to sneak Frank out of his room. Things were continuing to get better.

It felt so very surreal.

But they pulled it off. Frank left through the window, escaping without a hitch. And Mikey congratulated Gerard on managing to get a boyfriend. Even if they weren't technically that, they were practically that. And his parents didn't have much to say over dinner, less than usual.

Things were get better. Strangely.

Even the feeling of being watched subsided for the weekend.


	9. The World Is Pretty WorldIsPrettyworldispretty

The weekend came and went without much issue from his parents. At least not much more than usual. 

Though he and Frank had made plans to see each other again on Sunday, Frank had been grounded. His parents didn't much enjoy him returning home hours after he said he'd return. Hours after dinner. 

His slip-up had also caused his car to be taken away for the week. So, they couldn't go adventuring too far anymore, at least not for the time being, but Gerard wasn't too discouraged by it. 

And while Frank was pissed about getting his car taken away, he knew that things wouldn't change all that much. Besides, he talked about it with an air of arrogance, like it was worth it. A joke between him and Gerard. It was entirely worth it.

When Gerard went to meet Frank out by the rock wall, he found him standing with a bike. It was a somewhat rusted thing. Its yellow paint had been scratched over years of wear. Orange-red spots dotted the places where water and salt had repeatedly taken arms with it. 

It had its charm, though. Like an old photograph, taking on its own personality in its rough shape. 

"Hey." Gerard said as he made his way over. "What's with the bike?"

"I forgot I didn't have my car, so I was running late." Frank said. "The bike is quicker than the skateboard, and this way we can go somewhere."

He patted an extension. It appeared to be a makeshift seat. A metal attachment covered with layer upon layer of tied-on cloths to create a sort of cushion. 

It didn't look all that stable. Gerard wondered if they'd really make it anywhere without the thing breaking. At least anywhere far from here. He wasn't some forty-pound kid anymore, after all.

But he pushed the danger aside. It seemed trashily romantic, to ride with Frank on his bicycle. Acting like a motor-cyclist couple, with the production value of a middle school play. It seemed so perfectly them, minus the tragedy. 

"Alright, yeah." Gerard said, hesitation catching his voice and collapsing its tone.

There is appeared again, his shit-eating grin. 

Gerard usually hated that sort of smug smile, but Frank's was different. It always had been. It wasn't malicious or even self-infatuated. 

It was just a sort of fun that Gerard couldn't really understand. And he was strangely okay with that.

"Are you sure you can carry the both of us?" Gerard asked. It certainly wasn't a bicycle built for two, even if Frank had fashioned it as such.

"Yeah." Frank said, with his shit-eating grin, so fucking sure of himself. "I've done this before a few times. You just have to keep your center of gravity close enough to mine and we should be fine."

It calmed the uncertainty a bit, knowing he'd pulled this off before. Enough where he was entirely certain that this was a good idea. A brilliant idea. 

Or at least a good fucking time.

They walked up to the path so that they wouldn't, or rather Frank wouldn't, have to bike up a grassy hill. 

He hopped on the back of the bike. The seat wasn't too comfortable. The cloths didn't do jack-shit to cushion the bones that poked through his ass whenever he sat, but everything else about sitting on the bike balanced it out. 

He'd sat in more uncomfortable seats for hours on end before. And Frank would distract him perfectly.

He had to wrap his arms around Frank to make sure he wouldn't fall off the bike. It also made keeping the center of gravity issue easier to handle, and easily distracted him from the uncomfortable seat. 

He rested his feet on the pegs of the rear wheels, to keep the spokes from tripping. His knees slotted perfectly behind Frank's, like the corners of a framed picture. 

He had to move them when Frank pushed off the curb, pulling them back to allow Frank'd legs to move properly. But they still fit together perfectly. Sharing their warmth in the cool autumn afternoon, so very comforting.

As they took off, there was a moment of initial hesitation, caused by the additional weight on the back of his bike. But Frank quickly pushed through it, and he was soon flying as if it was nothing. 

Gerard, even though he knew Frank well now, and had gotten used to many of his curiosities, was once again surprised by this scrawny little fucker's sheer amount of energy.

They tore out of the school parking lot, and Gerard felt selfishly gleeful that Frank didn't have his car for the moment. 

It was euphoric, like other times he'd shared with Frank. But with this added layer of childish thrill. It felt dangerous, freeingly so.

His bloodstream hummed to life. His blood felt carbonated, fizzing and bubbling as it rushed on. Increasing adrenaline by one-hundred percent. 

He held onto Frank for dear life, but it wasn't a tragic ordeal in the slightest. He felt so, alive.

The way he was, pressed right up against him, flooded his memory with last Friday. It tangled his intestines into pretty little knots, but it wasn't painful. It was a good memory, one of his best in fact. He could hold it in his hands and let it wash over him again, here, without slipping away into something awful.

He slept better, the ghost of Frank shielding him from his nightmares. He knew it would fade, but it was golden while it lasted.

For a few minutes, the memory ate away at his insides in an aching sort of way. But eventually it passed, as he knew it would. Leaving him with a silver string threaded through his veins, to embellish the adrenaline. Intoxicating in a different sense.

He was flying like a bird for some time, every moment feeling more surreal than the next. As if he'd become just like the subjects of his graphite studies. Holding Frank close with glee as they zoomed through neighborhood after neighborhood, going nowhere in particular. For real this time.

He knew, somewhere deep down that this moment wouldn't last forever. Of course, there was the inevitable shit-show of his life when he returned by 5:30, but he knew his flight wouldn't last even 'til then. 

But he felt immortal, for now. This feeling was endless. 

Until it ended.

They turned a corner and a sick feeling followed. The traffic hadn't picked up, the space between rush hour and high school attendants being released vacating the roads to their more usual state of business. If Frank had had his car, or if they had left earlier, there would've been no noticing. It would've drowned out in all the commotion.

But Gerard noticed. He was still flying, but even birds had their enemies. And even some birds were cursed, damned to always have things go wrong. 

And Gerard was no bird. He was sordid as any human, and his demons were far hungrier and more terrible than that of any bird. 

So he was filled with a healthy dose of dread, as he noticed. A car followed them. At first, Gerard thought it to be coincidence. But when Frank turned in a square loop, the car didn't cease its pursuit. 

They spent some time shaking off the car. It took at least fifteen minutes, but they eventually managed to. 

They probably didn't even lose it. Not really. The car was probably just sick of them, looping about different neighborhood blocks and wasting their time. 

Besides, if it was the shadow person, creature, whatever the fuck, it already knew where he lived. So it didn't matter, not enough to waste that sort of time.

The feeling still hung around, though. Lingering like the acrid smell of vomit in the air of Gerard's nightmares. They biked for miles, and still it lingered. 

"Can we just go home?" Gerard eventually asked.

He was just mentally exhausted at this point. He couldn't imagine how Frank was still going, having been the one pedaling throughout this whole ordeal. Somehow he carried on, but Gerard got the notion that he too needed at least a break.

Gerard was no longer high, that fucking car had ruined it all. Frank would only logically, not be so high either. Not anymore. If he ever was.

Gerard just wanted to go home, and fuck around his room with Frank. It wasn't the safest all the time, but as long as they kept an eye on the clock, they'd be fine. The house was still vacant, and would be for a little while yet. Mikey off with Pete on some adventure of their own. 

Probably illegally driving around in Pete's worn-out car. Just like he and Frank were doing with the bike. Only they weren't, well, whatever the hell him and Frank were. They were friends, off adventuring like a band of gleeful idiots.

And they probably didn't have the creepy feeling. They were simply free, just as Frank and Gerard had been at the beginning of their adventure.

But now, the unknown was too daunting. 

And Gerard and Frank could be alone at home. Where the doors could be locked, to protect from any creeping cars. Even if it was only temporary, and even if it couldn't begin to replicate the childish high of nonsensical and passing freedom he'd felt at the beginning, he knew they couldn't replicate it again.

The air had turned too heavy for that.

Frank agreed, he was too creeped out to carry on into the unknown. 

They diverted off their initial path. Turning a corner, to head off in the direction of Gerard's home. Frank had memorized a few different routes to Gerard's home, in the time they'd spent walking home together. 

In fact, Gerard had learned a few new ones. Travelling through places that were more out of the way, or ritzy, than he'd usually dare to venture. 

This path headed straight through a ritzy neighborhood. It wasn't gated, but it was easily one step away from being that. 

The trees were groomed and trimmed to perfection. Each lawn green, as if it had been dyed. Neat and prim. It was all so very phony. But every house had these little bits that it couldn't cover up with its phoniness, that made it so interesting to interpret.

A few of the houses were beautiful. Properly beautiful, feeling out of place in the mostly homogeneous mixture of beige upper-middle-class suburbia. Places that people had clearly put a lot of care into. Not only time and money. Proper thought, a masterpiece in its own right. 

Those ones were surrounded by phoniness, but they were so fucking genuine. In some ways, Gerard kind of loved the beauty in the contrast. The pure irony.

He wondered if that's why Frank headed through this neighborhood on their walks home from time to time. To see the alienating brilliance and ugliness of here. 

It could've also been for nostalgia's sake. The fact that it passed by his old school, a private Catholic school perched upon a little hill. Frank had joked a few times about how he could still fit into the uniform. That he used it whenever he needed something kind-of formal because his dad was too tall for him to not drown in his formal wear.

They passed through the neighborhood and eventually crossed a main street, over to Gerard's neighborhood.

It was a stark contrast. The neighborhoods seemed to collide, just before you reached the busy road. No in-between zone, besides a lack of those artistic homes, which stood back further from the road. The transition was just box-made mini-mansions to stout old homes. 

Some of them were well looked after, but most of them were normal. Their lawns were growing out, but kept at bay. The paint was well-kept, but still peeling at the bottom from the previous winter's snowstorms.

A few run-down places dotted the place, like the opposites of those homes of artistry, but it was all very normal. It still had its phoniness, but everything did really. This was a less stuck-up type of phoniness. 

Though Frank would contest the point from time to time, on their walks to and from school, Gerard remained firm in this idea. 

But they didn't talk much about it today. Still too spooked by the lingering unease, left by the car that had trailed them far too much expertise. 

By the time they'd turned onto Gerard's street the unease had begun to settle. His stomach was warm once again, against Frank's back. His arms relaxed enough where they didn't hurt anymore from relentless tensing.

His veins slowly hummed back to life, not with the same intensity as before, but still so much better than he'd been a few minutes prior. 

Maybe it was because they were alone once again. Really, properly alone. Or at least they would be in a matter of minutes. 

But Gerard didn't dwell too much on why. He'd gotten better about not dwelling on it, now that things had started looking up. Now that he had Frank and Ray in his life. He simply let himself enjoy these moments as they came and went, or at least he tried to. He could always come back and over-analyze them later.

Frank pulled into his driveway, and Gerard hopped off to unlock the garage door. Frank fixed the cloths that had been shifted out of place as he waited. They found a place to hide the bike, just in case anyone got home early.

Everything was set in place: bike locked away in the garage so it wouldn't get stolen, no parents or brother to give them shit, no creepy car to murder and/or kidnap them.

He began to unlock the door, but he felt his hand hesitate in the lock. Even though this was Frank's second time over, it felt odd. 

He'd never invited people over because of his lack of friends. And lack of wanting people to know his parents, back when he did have friends. 

On Friday, his mind was too clouded with a shame-numbing lust to give a shit, about what Frank thought upon entering his home. Now was a bit different.

It did soften the blow, that he'd been there before. It wasn't like the scenery had much changed, after all. It was all still very New Jersey, with a bit more clutter and a bit more troubled undertone. 

And he still had the slightest tinge of lust-numbed brain, from being all pressed against Frank on the bike. It was worse before, enough to make Gerard afraid that he'd embarrass himself by popping a fucking boner while they were biking about, but the creepy fucking car had taken care of that for him.

He shut and locked the door behind them. They talked a bit about philosophical garbage and shows, but it soon devolved into making out. 

The feeling of being watched stopped them from doing anything of the sort really anywhere but in private. Except for behind the school, by the stone wall, but that was essentially private. Except for his avian friends, and Gerard trusted them to not be creeps or general dickwads. But even there, their safety was far from guaranteed. 

It almost made it more enticing, though. More intense. 

Like when he'd go days without eating a drop of anything sweet because it made that Saturday chocolate ice cream so much better. Or more accurately, like when he'd go weeks without jacking off because it made the experience that much more intense. 

Somewhere between the two.

Even though it had only been two days. For fucks' sake two days sense they had fucked, his bloodstream ran wild with hormones and his head with incoherence. 

Maybe even more now. Now that he'd gotten a taste of such ecstasy, not only mental but physical. All at once.

In his time with Frank, he'd gotten better at kissing. He'd thought their first few were good, and sure, they were, but these were so much better. Different skills and techniques put to the test each time, some working and some not, but with each one which did, making it all that much better.

He felt the gentle scrape of teeth against his lower lip, pulling a pit in his stomach, pulling his blood away from his head. His ass was still too sore for another round, but he needed something, anything.

A sigh of desperation and pleasure entwined escaped his lips when Frank accidentally brushed his leg between Gerard's, in their shuffle to find a place more stable. He did it again, this time intentional, keeping it there for some time and barely shifting it, almost to torture Gerard in the most pleasant was Gerard found imaginable.

He pressed into it experimentally, as they shared another wonderfully haphazard kiss, catching one anothers' sounds in the confines of their mouths. Frank pressed harder into the kiss, harder into everything, like he was searching.

He let his hand wander, travel to find Frank in the dark house, to help him find what he was searching for. He brushed over his crotch, letting his fingertips linger but not for too long. Frank pressed into his palm, giving a nod, so Gerard pressed harder against him.

He could barely handle the small noises he'd make, low in the still air, making him feel as if he were about to crumple to pieces or stardust. Instead he just found himself pressing even harder against his leg, rubbing against it even for any sense of something more because damn did he ever need it. 

He rolled his palm against Frank's crotch once again, but this time it sent him to his knees, his mouth watering for something he'd always been curious for.

"You sure?" Frank asked, his voice broken up with indulgent breath.

Gerard vehemently nodded, showing more of the anticipation he held than he'd thought. He could hear the sound of Frank saying something, but the words got lost in the rush of blood in his ears. He could just hear the zipper of his torn and worn-out jeans, electrifying his skin to another level. At the mere thought of what was at bay he pressed his palm firm against himself and let out an unsolicited cry.

He nuzzled Frank through the veil of fabric, absorbing every motion and sound. Every reaction, for a few seconds, because it was fun. To see Frank falling apart so quick, when Gerard had been on the other end last time. 

After a few moments more of playfully torturing Frank, he tugged at the short boxers. They were halfway down, Gerard's tongue flush against Frank's tip, before. The crunching of tires against the dead leaves in the driveway. His blood ran cold.

"Fuck." he cursed. He knew the sound. It was his father's car, home from work. Mikey wasn't here, so he'd surely wind up in some type of shit. But Gerard, Gerard, was about to suck off a guy in the living room. Mikey's absence would be entirely ignored if his father caught any wind of this.

Frank looked like a deer in the headlights, his boner still going strong but his mind entirely elsewhere. Gerard took his hand and told him to hide in the closet. It was a childish thing, sure, but he couldn't have Frank hanging about the house. He just knew his father would hate Frank, whether or not he knew about what sort of relationship the two of them had going or not.

Before his father was even at the door, the two of them took their bags, pants, and hauled ass to Gerard's room before all hell could break loose. Gerard hadn't told Frank a damn thing about his relationship with either of his parents, only a bit about his grandmother. But he seemed to get at the very least a decent idea on Friday night.

He shut the door behind him, giving him and Frank enough time to set up as if everything were normal.

The front door slammed shut just as Gerard

"You'd better be fucking studying." His father's unmistakable voice boomed throughout the house, sending terrible ripples through it like an earthquake which was solely mental. "If you end up working some fucking shit-end job I'll fucking kill you, you know."

He was drunk. It was too early for that, for him to be drunk enough to seem drunk, but it was also too early for him to be home. Something had happened, something bad. Gerard could see his scales of good and evil in his life balancing out to where they'd been preset once again. Shit.

"I am." he said. 

Loud and clear enough to be understood and heard, but to not speak over his father. He had to be careful with that. It was easy to slip up, especially when there was never any clear rubric on how he was supposed to talk in the first place. It was like those days them he would be shaken and spat at and told to act normal. He had no way of knowing what that meant, but in time he learned how to fake it enough to not pay more often than not.

There was some movement in the kitchen. A few minutes of crashing and what sounded like glass breaking, but after that it stopped. There was an unsettling silence, but no one came to his room. He decided it was safe enough to remove Frank from the closet, at least from now.

"Shit." Frank said. 

He knew somewhat what to expect, though. He could've made a closet joke. He could've made another one of his fucking smart-ass remarks, and Gerard would've liked that more. This is why he never invited anyone over. This bullshit, and the way people reacted. Good or bad, it was all negative to Gerard.

This was probably the best reaction he'd gotten, though. And there was no good reaction. Anything was terrible, like a twist in a knife because it was so fucking embarrassing, because it always felt like it was Gerard's fault, as illogical as he knew it to be. 

He closed the closet door once again, tossing his jacket in with the rest. Only then he noticed for the first time. Frank stood, holding the drawings. He'd been looking through them. 

"Where did you find those?" Gerard asked, his face flushing warm with blood. 

"Um," Frank said awkwardly. Gerard noticed something he hadn't before: a faint look of terror. It wrung at Gerard's heart, because he knew it was at him and his fucking head. "They were just in a stack on the shelf. I was getting bored in there. What the hell are they?"

"Comic panels." Gerard said curtly, crossing his arms to close himself off once again from Frank. 

He couldn't know. He already knew too much about Gerard and his incredulous fuck-up-ability.

"Yeah." Frank said. "Fuck's sake, I know that. But why the hell am I in them, and what the hell are all these?" he asked, pointing at the blood and the creatures and the flecks of ash raining int eh air.

"I don't know." Gerard yelled. "For fuck's sake I wish I knew but I don't."

He never yelled. He didn't like it, and his voice scared him. It made too much noise, and he was afraid he'd call attention to himself. And, even worse, he sounded too much like his father, in the way it seized his vocal cords, not in the way Mikey did. 

"Sorry." Gerard said, panicking. He didn't want to become that. He wasn't that. He couldn't. "They're nightmares."

Frank nodded. He didn't look scared anymore, just sad. Maybe even pitiful. Gerard couldn't decide is he found this expression worse than the last, but he wasn't given much time to think. Soon his father was up again and clamoring about the kitchen, headed straight for the hall.

"Fuck's sake." he bellowed. 

"Run." he said to Frank, pointing at the window. It was how he'd escaped the night he'd last been here, and it seemed it was going to be his exit each and every time he was here. Frank gave him a solemn nod and crept out the window.

"Who the fuck are you talking to? I'd better not have raised a fucking schizo!" he yelled.

Those words ate away at him more than his father's usually did. Too often he found himself questioning reality and he didn't know why his brain would play tricks on him too often for his own comfort. He didn't like to let his father get to him, but sometimes it was unavoidable. And he'd already been through too many emotions for the day, so he crumpled to the floor in front of the closet door, sobbing.

He door burst open, but he couldn't hear. He really couldn't hear much of anything. He was just waiting, waiting for anything to happen. because he felt like he had it coming. Because he wanted something to snap him out of it, something terrible like he deserved.

A sound, sharp as the snap of a rubber band. His skin began to hum with broken blood vessels, numbing around the side of his face, by his cheekbone. He could feel something viscous from

"Fucking sniveling nance." he could hear his father grumble, echoing in a muffled sort of way, as if he were underwater. "What a fucking waste of life. What a fucking waste of money. Piece of shit." 

He could hear the door close, muffled in the same way as everything was. He considered getting off the floor, seeing what the damage was, getting a drink to dull this shit stew of his head, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. He had no strength left. 

His phone pinged, and Gerard reached to turn off the ringer. It was Frank, asking is he was okay, and then asking him to his birthday party. Gerard responded with a yes and then a goodbye. he tossed the phone under his bed and just lie there. He wanted to put on some of his beloved self-pity smiths or some shit, but he couldn't get up to get his headphones. 

So he just lie there, for what seemed like hours. He was very good at that.


	10. Upside-Down

No. Shit. Not back hereagain. 

Concrete floor scraping away at his bloody knees. Must and iron and acid burning his nostrils. Churning his stomach. 

Sick, sick, so fucking sick. 

He'd wash out his insides with an abrasive steel sponge if he just could. Get all the rot and the filth, out of his veins and his stomach and his lungs. Out outout

Blood, so much fucking blood. 

He couldn't see it. Not yet. He knew he would. Second sight.

Soft feathers, so fucking out of place. No, nothereagain.

"Run." he whispered to Emily, but the words choked in his throat. "Fly."

"Kill."

He frantically searched the room for a window, a crack. Somewhere she could make it out alive, even if he couldn't. 

He couldn't. He already knew that. She might. She deserved it more than Gerard could ever hope to; life. 

"Kill."

notthisagainnotthisagainnotthisagain. No. 

He couldn't live if he killed such an innocent creature, so undeserving of this. Not if a goddamn gun was put to the nape of his neck.

His blood boiled as he heard the splashes of footsteps hitting the rough concrete. 

No that wasn't right. 

The concrete was supposed to be smoother. The monster wasn't supposed to be in the room. Where was the loudspeaker?

His veins flooded near an overdose of cortisol. 

Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck. 

No. 

His hands shook with fear and rage. Eyes boiling over from overwhelming. Teeth grinding together, to keep him from screaming bloody murder. 

Even if this was just that, fully deserving of the full reaction. Whether it was to a bird or a human.

He couldn't. He couldn't. No fucking way nofuckignwayinhell.

"Kill."

"NO!" he screamed, jerking his hands to attack the mystery demon. Something crunched. 

no.

nononononohehadnthecouldnthave.

He didn't give a shit. Not anymore. Not about anything but the blood on his hands and poorpoor Emily. 

Certainly not for himself.

This guy could fucking murder him for all he cared. He'd do it himself if he had to. 

He crumpled to the concrete floor, holding the limp body of the pigeon to his chest. As if there were any protecting her now. 

Her head lolled lifelessly when he moved, her hammering bird heartbeat extinguished from her ribcage. It sent rageful tears spewing from his eyes. 

Rageful at himself. He had done this. This was him now.

And he deserved whatever horrible fate awaited him.

Instead, he didn't care when the concrete ate away at his cheeks, scraping down to the bone and through to his mouth. He didn't care. 

He just lay and waited for the gunshot to take away his pain. But it never came.

He woke up to the sound of his alarm clock beeping. 

He had prayed nearly every night to sleep through to his alarm clock, but he never thought it'd be like this. He never wanted it to be like this. 

He would've traded waking up terrified to waking up feeling like a murderer any day. A fucking bird and friend murderer at that. 

Even if he didn't really do it, the guilt hung around him. Just like a cloud, dulling the world outside of his head, sharpening his shit-thoughts to a dagger-point. 

His father didn't even come barreling in as he usually did in the mornings, but he still felt shittier than normal. He wished he could've been happier about it, but he couldn't bring himself to find a way. It seemed there wasn't, because it was all his head.

On the way to close up his room again for the day, he noticed the small pool of blood on the floor by his closet. He'd forgotten about it, having grown accustom to the pain of his face over night, but now he was reminded. 

He felt a bit better about his dream, finding it some sick sort of karma. Even if it didn't reverse death. But this death was imaginary. He could pretend.

He was surprised he hadn't remembered upon seeing his face in the mirror. But he didn't much care to study his face today, at least not carefully enough to notice.

He grabbed some makeup he had stashed away in his closet, to make the bruises look semi-intentional. He showered the underneath of his eye in a red that verged on eye-infection, but it was just dark and rusty enough to be visibly different.

It kind of looked like shit, a bit lopsided and smudged, but he quite liked it. It made him forget a little about his guilt. And he wouldn't have to worry about his parents seeing his face, so that was nice.

He took an old towel out of his hamper and splashed it with the remains of some water. He added some supplemental vodka for good measure, and scrubbed the dried blood off of the floor. 

It came off easy. With the moisture, the alcohol, and the fact that he hadn't left it lying there for a week, something he'd made the mistake of doing over the summer. 

He decided that the job was done well enough. Where you could tell something may have happened, if you looked for the stains. But it wasn't clear or attention grabbing. He tossed the towel back into the hamper, hoping the stains would come out, but not having the time to take care of it now. 

For good measure, he took a pair of sunglasses and a swig of that vodka. For the nerve to face the day and in case he ran into his mother, or his makeup failed him. And left the room in its now once-again guarded, and hidden, state.

In the kitchen, his did run into his mother. She was making breakfast for two, her and his dad, he presumed. Because Mikey had already tucked into a plate of microwaved discount croissants, ones he'd picked up from the Wawa with Pete. 

He seemed to not have gotten any shit for his late arrival after all, but it made Gerard smile a bit. Maybe he'd be alright, they'd all be alright, and this would all blow over. 

Gerard only had another year of this, and Mikey seemed to fare better with his parents somehow. And with Gerard no longer here to start shit with his mere presence, he'd have better odds right off the bat.

Mikey probably fared better because he was closer to the 'perfect son' archetype. Something which Gerard had never quite fit, not even in childhood. It comforted Gerard, though. Knowing he wouldn't effectively be leaving Mikey to the wolves when he got the fuck out of here. 

He grabbed some bread and tossed it in the toaster. His mom made a remark about his sunglasses, and MIkey joked he'd gotten into a fight. Gerard tried to laugh along, but still play it off like it was for fashion. 

It seemed to work enough, because his mother seemed to be elsewhere. Mikey sensed something else. Gerard could read it in the creases written on his forehead, but he ignored it.

His mother returned to her room, and Gerard collected his toast and poured himself a mug of coffee to down. He drank his coffee and pulled his boots on and was all ready to go, when he heard something he wasn't supposed to. 

From the back of the house, in the quiet of the halls, his father wasn't going in to work today. He didn't know why, but he knew it was rare. Something was wrong.

He pretended not to hear it, though. Mikey certainly seemed not to have, and he didn't want to cause more shit than he'd already done. But there was no way of telling whether or not Mikey's face was lying. Not now, at least. 

He fled the scene before any possible shit could hit the fan. 

His checked his phone, which he rarely did in the mornings. But yesterday, he and Frank had really texted for the first time. And Gerard had left it all off strangely, too soon for their normal conversation. 

'are you ok?' his phone read, from Frank, around ten last night. 

He considered texting him back, but didn't. It was all really quite pointless. They'd see each other soon enough, and Frank could see that he was alright. 

Or at least alright enough. Frank probably wouldn't see past the shitty makeup, the sunglasses, or the funny way he'd found himself talking and chewing his toast, because his jaw ached too much on one side.

It would all be okay, he swore to himself. It would be. As long as he could convince everybody else, they could convince him. It was really a neat trick to keep himself afloat. Worked wonders, really.

Frank did notice, though. Of course he did. 

Gerard chalked it up to restlessness from his nightmares. That he'd slammed his face on one of his bedposts in the struggle. But he could read it on Frank's face: he wasn't believed.

Frank let it up, though. He knew when he was pressing too far. And he knew that, if he continued, it would be too far. 

Gerard liked that about Frank. It was sweet, how he could be concerned without being invasive. It warmed Gerard's heart, something which he direly needed on the cold autumn day. He probably didn't know it, but Gerard hoped he did.

He gave him a quick hug and peck good-bye before they headed back into the public eye, both of them still too spooked by the creeping feeling. 

Gerard was still too scared for anyone to know. For anything to reach his family's ears, as he knew it would, should news get out. He though Frank the same, but he had no way of knowing. He was far more of a bright spitfire that Gerard, and his world seemed to be a different one. Maybe he was only freaked out by being watched.

Throughout the classes he and Ray shared, they incorporated Gerard's latest nightmare into the storyline. It was growing more and more convoluted, more distressing and disturbing. 

Gerard quite liked it. Ray seemed a little spooked by it. But Gerard reassured him, he wasn't about to go killing any birds. It was just a nightmare, after all. He wasn't going to be murdered, either, so it didn't matter.

Everything was okay.

Ray seemed convinced enough. At least enough to carry on with the comic, and not ditch Gerard out of fear of him being a bird-killer. He just seemed a bit worried. Not like Frank, not like Mikey either. Just a hint of an undertone.

But everything was okay. And everything would be.

He was living a decently normal life. Or at least a decently happy one, compared to the one he'd had a month ago. 

Sure, he didn't particularly fear the thought of being hit by the bus. Well he did, if he weren't to die upon impact. But as long as the pain wasn't drawn out, it still didn't scare him.

But he thought, the life he had now was quite nice. He reveled in it a bit, just a dash of self-indulgence.

He was even going to a party. A birthday party. His boyfriend's birthday party. Or whatever they were. The thought still ran through his veins, happy and alive. 

He could even probably have some socially acceptable drinks. The thought kind of scared him, used to drinking alone to stay alive or stave off his mind. He was scared. Of how might of give himself away. Of how he might react around people.

But he wanted so badly to be normal. Normal enough. And he would be okay. Frank would be there. And even Ray, so long as he wanted to. He'd asked Frank about it this morning, and he seemed quite happy at the prospect.

'are you free on halloween?' Gerard wrote in the corner of his notebook which they had been passing back and forth to work out their concepts. 

'yeah.' he wrote. 'trick or treating?'

'no. birthday party.'

'yeah, cool. who's?'

'frank's.'

Gerard had long since forgotten about trick-or-treating. The real trick-or-treating. 

All he'd done in these recent years is dress up in costume, and attend this Halloween show at the record shop a mile or two from Gerard's house. It was near the comic shop, but in a bit of a dingier location. 

It was usually a mix of shitty, bland, and downright astonishing bands. Gerard could hang around until midnight if he got close enough to the stage, where they wouldn't bother to weed you out at ten o'clock even if you were under eighteen. He usually made it there, only finding himself kicked out once in his whole life.

On the way home, he'd take whatever candies he could find. Most of them were on people's porches. People who'd left for the night, or simply didn't want to bother running to and from the door every few minutes. 

He could stay up late on those nights, so long as he kept his pocketknife and phone on him. Because each year, his parents would attend this company-hosted Halloween party, and stay out into the wee hours of the morning.

At the end of the day, as they always did, Frank and Gerard met by the rock wall and started their walks home together. Frank lived not too far from Gerard, as he had come to find. Though he'd never been to Frank's house before. 

He'd found it a little funny. How he'd been to Gerard's house twice now, and Gerard had never been to his. Usually it was the other way around. 

Gerard, of course, was infinitely curious. He used to love houses, going through a phase where he'd wanted to be an architect when he was a kid. He'd lost his infatuation with them, but he still was intrigued by them. 

It was a little piece of a person, a family, a set of housemates. Even in what was and wasn't phony, you could tell a lot. 

He suspected his old infatuation was one of the reasons he was unable to keep what little friends' he'd had as a kid, probably creeping them out a bit. Even now, as its ghost lingered.

But Frank found it peculiar. Not bad, just peculiar.

Today there was no bike, because Frank wasn't late, and because they planned on getting slurpees from the 7/11 on the way. 

And they did, walking with their arms linked like gleeful schoolchildren. Gerard sipping a cherry slushie, and Frank a coke slushie. It was all very splendid, the sun warmer today than it had been yesterday. And the slushie did a good job to numb the aching of his face.

It was all very splendid, until they reached Gerard's home. And Gerard's heart sank like a stone in still waters.

His father's car stood in the driveway, foreboding as a watchful raven.

"Shit." Gerard cursed. 

He unlatched his arm from Frank's, thankful he hadn't arrived on the bike. He would've been all pressed up against Frank, a fucking death sentence should his father ever catch wind. But even something so innocent as this, so unassuming as this, arms linked and drinking slushies, would've been deemed too much in his father's eyes.

Frank looked at him with a concerning look, the same one he'd given when Gerard hid him in the closet. The same one he'd given, when Gerard showed up that morning in unconvincing makeup. 

He tried to make it seem palatable enough for his father not to ask questions, or more accurately lose his shit, but it was too late. 

"Gerard. Inside. Now." His father stated. 

As if it were an order, it was an order, an incantation which Gerard couldn't deny. Even though he wanted to so fucking much, he'd been conditioned to go against his head all these years. His body was a zombie.

He could hear Frank's footsteps behind him. He wanted to warn Frank. But his head was too clouded with the thoughts of possible consequences to tell him to run. 

That if he were to stay, Frank would get caught up in everything. And maybe the dream would come true, in part. Maybe he'd end up killing a bird, a small creature of innocence. A piece of Frank. Even if he didn't want to.

His father didn't bother to shut the door himself, letting it slowly swing shut behind them. 

He didn't even bother to tell Frank to leave. You could tell in his eyes. He really didn't give a shit anymore.

He lunged at Gerard, who flinched. But he didn't dare move from where he stood. 

His father grabbed the collar of his shirt and just shook.

He could feel Frank scrambling to separate them with his flailing hands, but it was pointless. He just kept getting knocked away. Knocked down, Only effectively injuring himself. 

He could feel the collar of his shirt, sharper than it really was. It cut into his neck, as if he were being choked. 

He tried halfheartedly to shake himself free, fucking survival instinct. But he knew it always made things worse, to play it that way. He just had to remain limp as a cloth doll,until it was all over. 

If it ever would be.

His father was yelling more than usual this time. Proper yelling. His breath smelled like stuffy death. Streaming out at high velocity, alongside flecks of spit. They dotted Gerard's face like blood spatter. 

He wanted to run. he wanted to run. But he knew better than that.

His father was yelling something terrible. 

Gerard's eyes were welling up, even though he couldn't hear a damn thing. The blood and the ringing in his ears muffling all the noise. 

His eyes would well up and then fade away in cycles, knowing never to spill over. It was far too risky to cry.

Frank was still trying. Even as Gerard gave him pleading looks for him to stop, again and again he kept trying to stop it all. 

His face was all bloodied and scraped up. Little bits of the floor making their way into one of his wounds, but he was still trying. The same look seizing his face the entire time, panicked and vengeful.

Gerard's head buzzed from not breathing, and he could finally relax enough to hear.

"Fuck you." his father screamed. 

It should've terrified him. He was screaming. He never screamed, that was for special occasions. To terrify beyond belief.

But Gerard didn't care. His head was going to fuzzy to bother. 

"Fuck you! I did not spend my time and money for seventeen fucking years for this bullshit. You get the fuck out of here. You are not my son, you fucking faggot whore. Get the fuckout."

His;s body was growing limper by the minute. He could feel the floor against the soles of his shoes, getting dragged backwards. 

The sun hit his face, but he could no longer open his eyes to see it. He was outside. Frank was still flailing. This time trying to pull Gerard out of the grasp of his father. But he couldn't. 

It was all really too late. 

Finally he was let go. 

Dropped. He could feel most of his body crash against the concrete sidewalk, but Frank managed to catch the rest of him. 

He could finally breathe. Little, tiny breaths were all he could afford, but he could breathe. 

Frank was crying as he cradled Gerard's corpse-like body in his arms, but Gerard smiled. He was free. They were free.


	11. Stop Thinking And Drown

Gerard couldn't remember much of what had happened between there and Frank's couch. He knew no one had called the cops, not that they'd ever done jack-shit when they had been contacted. 

Somehow he'd wound up here. 

He could vaguely remember lying in the back seat of someone's car, his face squished against the cold leather seat. He'd overheard a discussion in the front seat, something about taking Gerard to the hospital. 

He couldn't remember if it was between Frank and him or with Frank and someone else, though. Someone had to have picked them up. Frank didn't have his car. Maybe he'd called a taxi, but it didn't certainly didn't feel like a taxi.

All he knew was that he was in Frank's home. 

Not that he could remember getting into his home. He could just tell by the wall of framed family portraits across from him. 

He seemed to be an only child. He was the only kid consistently present throughout the pictures, usually smiling that obnoxious adorable fucking smile of his. The arrangement looked a little phony, but it was the type of phony that was nice. It showed that whoever hung the portraits loved Frank, putting care into the placement of each piece.

He glanced around the room, and found himself alone. It felt nice, to take this moment by himself, but he wished Frank were here. 

The dead-ends of daylight strained through the sheer green curtains, barely illuminating the room. It had a cozy sort of misery that warmed Gerard's heart in a dreadful way. Or maybe that was just the aftermath of finally leaving.

This home felt almost like his friends' homes used to feel, whenever he'd go over to visit them as a kid. Except here, he felt less out of place. It wasn't nearly as terribly surface-level, not nearly as prim and proper. 

It was more personal than that, letting Gerard sink in to the surroundings. 

The couch was plush. There were some pet hairs stuck to the fabric, but he hadn't seen any pets around. They must've been out somewhere. There were two windows facing the front of the house. Along each of them stood a neat line of houseplants, potted a mix of old jam and pickle jars.

Frank rounded the corner, carrying a small mug of what smelled like coffee. He wore comfortable clothes; grey sweatpants and a very oversized black sweatshirt. His dark green fuzzy socks matched the general vibe of the room, as he plodded about. 

His face had been washed of blood, and his hair was still dewy from presumably a shower to wash away the struggle. He was no longer crying, thankfully. His face wore a warm and timid smile instead, making Gerard feel a little bit less shit about Frank getting involved.

"Hey." he said, quietly, handing Gerard the mug. 

He sounded almost scared. As if he were going to shatter Gerard into a million tiny pieces, if he were to raise his voice to a normal decibel. 

"Hey." Gerard said. It was all he could think to say. 

He'd found himself unsure, lacking of words once again. His life had been turned upside-down. 

For some reason there was a sense of undeniable joy that it brought him. He hated that life. He fucking loathed it, even if he was left with nothing now. He wished Frank hadn't been there to witness its destruction, but it was still worth it.

"Are you alright?" Frank asked, sitting by Gerard on the couch.

Gerard hated it. How he talked so carefully. So fragile around Gerard. Even though it warmed his heart, he loathed it. It was far too close to pity for Gerard's taste. Even if it was an entirely normal question, for what had just ensued.

"Yeah." he said. 

He could hear his own voice clearer now. It was terrible and raw. Like someone had taken a piano wire and hatched at it until it grated against every breath. 

"Yeah." he repeated to himself, like it would convince him. "Are you?"

"I mean," he said, "I'm more concerned about you. I'll be fine, my injuries are completely superficial and temporary." he said, pointing at his face. "I don't know if you want to talk about it. It was, is, probably a lot for you to go though. But if you need anything, to talk, to just be together or alone, or anything else, just tell me."

He hadn't thought about it until this moment, of all the good he'd left behind. His dad was probably destroying everything this very moment. Probably trashing each of the prized items, which Gerard had worked so had to collect and create. And even worse, he'd left Mikey behind without warning.

It pained his heart, but he knew he couldn't go back yet. 

For now, he had to worry about where to stay. Where to get booze. Where to get money. And something to cover up the superficial aftermath.

"Do you have a scarf I could borrow?" he asked. "And something hard like vodka or tequila?" 

Frank nodded with a solemn look, like he'd wished Gerard to say something else. He held Gerard's hand in his for a moment. Like doing such a silly thing would drain any of Gerard's bullshit. 

He paused. He didn't look anywhere. And then he left.

It wasn't strange, even though it felt strange. He missed Frank even though he had only left for a moment. And it was at Gerard's own request. 

He didn't know whether to hate or revel in this, being rendered practically immobile by some force. He hadn't gotten injured as bad as Frank. At least not in count, the damage done to his neck and not all over like Frank. 

He just lie there on the couch. It was much softer than any other couch that he had been on. Besides the rotting couch cushions, in the backstage of the school theater. But that was shitty soft. 

This was comfy-soft. It made a nice nesting ground for Gerard and his dragged-down mind. It even smelled distantly like Frank.

Even though he was in a hazy and fucked sort of comfort, he longed for when Frank was here. 

Each minute that had gone by since he'd woken up felt like a century. He had so many questions. Things he needed to do. But his body was too heavy and too tired to do much. 

Even the simple act of moving his lips took a sapped a lot of his energy. 

Blinking fell under the same category. He stared off at the hallway, letting his eyes dry and glaze over. He really wasn't looking at anything. He just let his pupils dilate to neutral, where nothing was in focus but his eyes weren't strained. 

It was like the point just before he'd fall asleep. Only he wasn't falling asleep, and his eyes were wide open. He probably looked like a dead fucking fish this way, but he couldn't be bothered to give a shit.

Frank rounded the corner, only phased by Gerard's dead starlet appearance for a moment. He carried a grey and black striped scarf and a glass of ice with what was most likely vodka. At least Gerard hoped it was, because that was his safety-blanket of booze. And he need all the safety blankets he could get his hands on right now.

Gerard took his time to sit upright. As he would need to be, to not choke on the vodka. He'd done that before, and it was absolute hell to aspirate. It felt like fucking acid when it got anywhere near your lungs, in the worst way possible. 

His neck hurt as he sat up, but is had hurt just the same while he was lying down. If not more, from the friction between his neck and the couch.

He took a sip of the vodka, anticipating its kind and familiarly numbing burn to wash down his throat. But it didn't. 

It wasn't really anything. It was fucking water. 

He gave Frank a look of annoyance, but immediately wanted to take it back. He just wanted booze. But if Frank didn't want to give him what was probably his parents' booze, or even if it wasn't, that was for him to decide. 

"Yeah." Frank said. "I came here to ask if you wanted an ibuprofen instead of alcohol. It would probably work better."

"No." Gerard said. 

Ibuprofen would've been great. But he wanted the vodka more. Sure, ibuprofen would've been more physically effective. But he could deal with that end of the pain. 

Frank gave him a smirk. He did that a lot, but this one carried a pity which Gerard loathed. 

"You're not alright." Frank said, handing him the scarf. "I know that, you know? It's okay to not be alright. You don't need to be scared of it, not anymore."

All Gerard could do was stare blankly. He wouldn't accept that he wasn't alright. 

Only he could tell himself that, because he had his own version of alright. It wasn't alright, but it was Gerard's best. Where he could feed off his shit mind, and make stories and shit. He knew he wasn't alright, not even by his own definition, but he would vehemently resist admitting it.

Gerard hesitantly accepted the scarf. He knew he needed it, at least if he wanted to continue pretending that everything was alright. 

He tried to put it on. But when he raised his shoulders to place the soft knitted scarf around his neck, a sharp pain shot up his skull and down his spine. Like someone had taken a fucking ice pick to it.

He tried it again, but there was the same exact pain. And this time it lingered. 

"Could you," Gerard asked, handing Frank the scarf. 

He didn't like putting the responsibility on Frank, but he was scared he'd do some permanent damage if he carried on.

Frank nodded, and took the scarf. 

He wrapped the scarf around Gerard's neck gingerly. It didn't hurt too bad, though. Not when he did it. 

Even when he fucked up and let the scarf run against his neck. It was like wearing jeans after you fucked up your knee tripping over the sidewalk or falling off a bike. It was really nothing.

Once the scarf was affixed, he knelt down to do some more adjustments. It was the first time Gerard had gotten a clear view of Frank's face, up close and all fucked. 

He still had flecks of dried blood dotted around his mouth and his nose. The corner of his upper lip was puffy and split, sealed shut with a small butterfly bandage. His right cheek was bruised about seven different shades of rotting blueish purple, but it remained unbusted. 

Amazingly, both his lip and nose rings had stayed in place, even though his nose was all scratched up in the scuffle.

He smiled for a moment. It wasn't a happy smile, but he found it a bit funny.

"What?" Frank asked, pausing his work.

"You and I," Gerard said, laughing only one laugh before he remembered how much pain he was in, "We're matching."

Frank gave a quick smile. It was similar, filled with amusement. And for Frank, sympathy. Gerard didn't mind the sympathy that much this time. It was nothing like the pity this time around.

"Yeah, we are, I guess." he said, before moving closer again to adjust the striped scarf.

He didn't know why. Maybe it was attempt to kill the pain he hadn't treated. Maybe it was because Frank had stopped his pitying. Or maybe it was to feel something more than this strange emotion which had come to embody him.

Gerard too leaned closer, to suggest a kiss. 

Frank kissed him back. But he forgot about the injuries, tugging on the ends of the scarf to pull Gerard closer.

It scraped away at Gerard's neck. For a fraction of a moment he liked it, the pain mixing in with the thrill, but it grew too much. 

He made a muffled sort of scream between their mouths, unwilling to break the kiss just yet because it was beginning to work. He was beginning to forget. But Frank let go.

"Sorry." he said, panic lacing his voice. "I forgot."

"I'm fine." Gerard said. He could feel the pain tinging his voice again, returning from the break. "Just be careful."

Frank readjusted the scarf. Gerard wanted to try kissing him again. He wanted to forget for a moment longer, but Frank seemed to be in some sort of a rush.

"My parents are gonna be home soon." Frank said.

Of course. It occurred to him, that he didn't even know what time it was. He still had a million unanswered questions on his mind, and the nagging need for a couple shots of vodka and a nice warm cigarette. But everything would have to wait.

"Should I leave?" Gerard asked. He didn't know what Frank's parents would make of all of this.

"No." Frank said. "You can stay, we just can't be making out on the couch. I can probably convince them to let you stay the night, but we'll have to find somewhere else for longer."

"I'll figure it out." Gerard said. He felt he was already overcharging his favor-credit by a million dollars. "Who drove me here?"

"Shaun." he said, not having his words stick, to let the answer slide away from view. "Are you sure that you can find somewhere to stay? Because I know a few places you could stay that are pretty cheap."

"No." Gerard said. He didn't really have any money anyway. "I'll try to crash at my grandparents'."

His stomach lurched. He wanted to spill everything out, admit that he wasn't okay, but the events had made him want to wall himself away more than ever. For now, it was okay to wall himself away. In fact, it was a good thing, this walled away effect, with Frank's parents seemingly edging upon arrival.

"I'll be okay." He repeated. To Frank, but mostly to himself. "I'm okay. I promise."

His parents did, as expected, let Gerard crash there for the night. That dinner was a different type of terrible. Just awkward, not dangerous. It was much better, but it in some ways just reminded him of home. Of Mikey, of how he might be worrying over Gerard.

But he knew. Mikey probably knew. He probably he knew all along. He was probably he was the one who'd told their father, in the first place. No one else knew but him. At least not until it had all come crashing down.

Fuck Mikey. He'd have to be careful about avoiding him at school, because he knew they wouldn't fight. They weren't kids anymore. And besides, Gerard would never win those smaller fights when they were kids. 

No, Gerard would just have to run and hide. Make sure he had a breakdown in the bathroom stall, instead of the school halls. 

It was a shitty thought, being stabbed in the back by the one person who seemed to always have had his back in the past. But it was the way it was. 

He had Frank now. And as he slept in his twin sized bed, wrapped around him beneath a barrier of grey checkered blankets, he knew he would be alright. In time, sure. But he could make it out alive. Happy, even.

Under a sky of band posters and stickers, and other random things that Frank had thought were cool and just stuck everywhere, he was safe.

He was okay. As long as Frank was there.

Despite his day, he had no nightmares. He even dreamed something lovely.

He couldn't remember, but he knew it was.

If only the rest of the week could've gone well. 

It was a haze. 

Gerard knew it had happened. He knew it was shitty, but he couldn't pick out any event. 

His time was spent with people, but they weren't really there. He knew they weren't, but that didn't stop the people and the creatures from haunting him and muttering things under their breath. 

It scared him, on some level. But he still couldn't feel much through the haze.

He went to school. He must've. He definitely worked on the comics with Ray. He almost slept with Frank a few times, but he seemed to know something was up. So they never did.

He probably asked Gerard if he was okay, tried to help as he could. But Gerard couldn't remember.

Everything was a haze. But now, he was conscious again. He thought. 

Maybe he wasn't really, and he'd just forget about this. Letting the memory cloud over the corpse eyes in time. 

But he really felt conscious, the first time since he'd stayed with Frank. 

He thought.

He'd burned himself. That must've been why. The pain was breaking him back into reality.

He didn't remember on what.

From the looks of his arm, it was the stove. His grandparents had this old stove that took ages to cool down. The grates formed of strange heat-retaining metal. Those grates had those same characteristic swirls which now adorned Gerard's arm.

He wanted to be conscious and all, just not like this. 

It wasn't the burn, it was the dreadful feeling in his stomach. It was all over. It was supposed to be a beginning but nothing had begun. And nothing was going to begin. 

He'd been wrong. 

It had taken him until now to finally see it, but he had been wrong. So incredibly wrong.

He didn't want to take back Frank, though. His time with Frank had been the happiest he'd known. Even if these past few days had been shit, he'd still been there, offering up the little light that did pass through.

Frank. Gerard needed to call him. He didn't remember why, but he knew he did. It was like a compulsion. Like scratching his nose, when he was put on the spot and needed to think of an answer. 

He needed Frank. 

To say goodbye. 

Gerard didn't know where he was going, but he knew he wasn't sticking around. Not like this.

Shit. Something stabbed into his foot. He looked down to find a mess of shattered glass. There were probably thirteen different broken bottles strewn about the room he stood in. The unfinished basement.

He didn't know why the hell he was in there, or why glass was shattered all over.

It didn't matter. He needed Frank. He needed him now.

He called once. No one answered. 

Mikey had been texting him about something. 

Gerard just deleted them all. He didn't want to deal with that asshole right now. In fact, he blocked him. Just to make sure he didn't have to deal with him. 

He was already dealing with enough already. He must've been. Even if he couldn't remember. 

In fact, he should text his father about Mikey and Pete. Fuck him over to settle the score. Even if he had no knowing. He still had no idea if they were a thing, which they probably weren't. He wanted so badly to get any taste of revenge to replace this dread.

But he knew he wouldn't. He still cared too much for Mikey, even if he'd been fucked over so terribly by him.

He'd been staying in the guest room. He'd taken his stuff out of his room and moved it here one day once Frank had gotten his care back. His dad wasn't there. He couldn't've been. Gerard would've remembered the fallout. 

He'd been living off of largely beer. He wasn't really hungry so he didn't eat. He just smoked and drank and sang and drew. What, he couldn't quite remember.

He called again. This time Frank picked up.

There was a deadly silence, before Frank finally broke it.

"Gerard?" he asked, his voice cracking with a pained sort of concern.

"Could you please come over?" Gerard asked. His voice came out shaky and rasped. Why did it do that. "I have a bad feeling."

"Yeah. I've got to finish up some chores, but yeah." Frank said. "Are you okay?"

"I think so." Gerard said. 

There was another deadly silence. 

He knew Frank would break it again. He would ask if Gerard was sure, knowing damn well he wasn't okay. 

But Gerard didn't stick around to see it play out. He hung up the phone before he'd get questions he couldn't answer. 

Then the panic set in. He needed to clean up. He said he was okay. He had to make it look the part.

At least not like a booze-bomb had been set off in the very room he was standing in. 

He scrambled to pick up the glass pieces. 

But when he went to set down his phone, he found his hands sticking to the device. 

He looked down, and saw blood. So much blood.

He looked around the room. 

There was more in a corner. It was almost fresh, maybe twenty minutes old. 

But then he could feel it. The gashes on his arms, tingling with a pain that almost numbed.\

They were still dripping blood. Scabbed over and no longer spewing, but still staining the floor.

He had to clean it up.

His heart rate climbed through the roof, casing the wounds to bleed even more. 

He had to clean it up. No.

He had to fix it. Why What the hell had he done here. And how the hell had he gotten here.

Frank. He needed to call Frank. 

Then he would clean up the mess. 

But Frank, Frank could help. He couldn't go to the hospital, and be forced into a psych ward where his parents could control his life once again.

He refused. Even if he would end up causing his own demise in this very moment, he would at least be free of them.

No, he couldn't think about that yet. 

Just Frank. He needed to call Frank. 

He didn't remember dialing, but he heard the other line ringing.

"Hello?" Frank asked, when he picked up. 

His voice was so neutral that Gerard almost cracked up at the sick incidental joke. But his head was too elsewhere.

"Frank." he said. "Please hurry."

"Okay. I'm trying to hurry." Frank said. He sounded like he was trying his best to not be irritated. He didn't get the urgency. "I should be there in half an hour."

"There's not enough time." Gerard said. 

He knew the hopelessness bled through into his voice, but he couldn't afford to care. He needed it to.

"Are you alright?" Frank asked. He always did. He knew he wasn't, but he knew how to read Gerard's response to get an answer.

It annoyed him all too often, but now he needed it.

"I don't think so." Gerard said. 

It was something so small, so simple, but it felt like he was signing his fate away with it. Then again, he was bleeding out on gashes caused by smashed booze bottles. So one way or another, he'd be doing the same thing. 

Frank was here now. Gerard couldn't remember the space between. The room had been cleaned up, the only evidence remaining as bloodstains on the concrete floor. 

He didn't speak. He just walked around like a ghost, until he joined Gerard on the basement floor.

He held Gerard, cradling him in his arms as Gerard sat in his lap. Gerard felt so small, so strangely safe in his arms.

There was a bittersweetness to it. And the way he kissed. The way the taste of cherries and cigarettes flooded his senses, chasing away the hopelessness with another kind.

Someone knocked on the door.

He was slipping in and out of it again, but he was remembering more than he had these past few days.

But now he was at the door. Frank. It was Frank. How.

Fuck. He was doing it again. Cherries and cigarettes. He'd known it, he'd always known it.

Didn't he.

Frank just stood there, shaken out of his body.

Until he broke and hugged Gerard, crying.

"Gee, shit." Frank sobbed. "We need to get you to a hospital. I. You can stay with me. I'll figure it out. I'll just tell them you got kicked out and they'll let you stay and we'll be okay. You'll be okay. I swear. Please just. I don't know. I can't. Just."

He was spilling with incoherence, but Gerard got it. He too broke down. His tears streaking his face and sticking Frank's hair to his skin. 

"I didn't mean to." Gerard gasped. "I don't. I can't remember any of it."

Frank didn't respond. He didn't need to.

He carried Gerard to the restroom. Even though he was the lighter of the two, he did it seamlessly. He held Gerard close every moment. He knew Gerard would slip away if he didn't.

He always knew.

He treated and bandaged up Gerard's arms delicately, like he'd done it a million times before. Never letting go of Gerard, but never leaving it just be him either. It was them. 

Gerard didn't care if he was going to live past now, but he didn't need to stop now either. 

"I'm so sorry." Gerard sputtered, as the tears began to fade away and he was left drained of life. "I'm so fucking sorry."

"Don't be." Frank said. "Just know: it's always bullshit. You'll make a life, a big and grand life. I know it. You're so much more than this. And I think that some part of you knows it, even when the other voices drown it out. It's still there because it knows. It really knows."

Gerard didn't say anything. He didn't need to. He just let the words and the tears wash over his skin. They did more than any fucking bandage could do.

He could be infinite again. He could be alright again. Even if it was only just for the moment.

He was safe in Frank's embrace. This time he wouldn't slip thorough the cracks in his fingers.


	12. Not Afraid

Halloween was finally here.

Gerard woke up, finding that he'd stolen the entirety of the knitted blanket Frank kept atop the covers. At some time during the night, he'd balled it up over him, like some sort of shield. 

He hadn't had any nightmares, the fear remained. It was lesser, sure, but it was still undoubtedly there. He doubted it would ever go away. He was just glad that the nightmares, especially the ones that had seemed to fucking real, had up and disappeared.

They'd disappeared for some time before, but they'd made their return in his time alone. This time it felt permanent. 

Today was Frank's birthday. Today was Halloween.

Today Gerard had realized, he didn't really have anything to give Frank. 

He'd have to find something before the days' end. But when he was a kid he'd always make gifts. He'd just make Frank one sometime today.

Frank's cat, Mitch, had nestled himself in the cavity of space just between him and Frank's thighs. Perhaps he could make something for Mitch. A little charm for his collar or something cute like that.

He decided against it, though. Maybe he would in the end, but he felt like that alone wouldn't be enough. It wasn't personal enough. 

That was more something he'd give Mitch for Christmas. 

Frank's alarm clock went off, blasting his favorite local station. It was run by a group of friends of someone he knew, and older brother of one of his own friends. It was blasting some Blink-182 this morning, something off Enema of the State, though Gerard couldn't remember which one. It had been a while.

Frank took a few minutes to move. Or to even open his eyes, really. But eventually, he reached over and pressed the button that made it shut up. 

Mitch had remained unphased by the music. But now that Frank had disturbed his little nest, he gave up rest. He stood up and stretched and passive-aggressively kneaded the covers. 

Gerard picked Mitch up and placed him in his lap to pet. It was one of those mornings, brought on by the cold weather creeping in. Slowing his brain and just making him want to laze about and stay in bed all day. 

Frank wasn't helping much either. Even though he'd left, the bed still smelled of his sleepy skin. It felt like home.

Even if it wasn't really his own home, it felt like home. At least here, where they were alone. 

In the past years, a proper lazy day would've been an absurd idea. Even on the weekend. He'd wind up in deep shit, if he were to stay in. 

But here, but now, he was surrounded with a life he loved. More than any other life he'd led or even loved just for a passing moment. If only he could, he'd hang around, even if only for a few hours more. 

Warm and safe within the four walls of Frank's room, a new escape. Impenetrable to the creeping feeling and the nightmares and the horrors of life. The best sort of hazy.

But Frank stood in the corner by his closet, trying to figure out what clothes to wear. A reminder Gerard that he, just like Frank, still had to go to school. 

Otherwise the school might call his parents, and he'd wind up back in hell. He'd escaped from that place, and he wasn't going back. He'd die before he went back.

He stopped petting Mitch, even though he'd begun to purr. The vibrations traveling up his bones to his skull, to bring an invisible smile to his face, were cut off. But he knew.

Life went on, even if he tried to put it on pause, life couldn't. Mitch walked away when he figured he wasn't going to get any more attention from Gerard, hopping off the bed with the tiniest of plops as his dainty little feet hit the floor.

Gerard laughed in amusement. He loved cats. 

With the ban on pets in his home. No, his old house. Here he no longer lived there. And it was never really a home. Never safe enough to be called that.

He'd forgotten about the joys of normal pets like cats and dogs, until he'd started crashing here. He used to making friends with random creatures he'd found. Real or fake. 

Frank had one of each: a cat and a dog. They seemed to get along strangely well, almost like him and Mikey used to get along, back when they were kids. 

For a moment it saddened him, remembering the one thing he'd left that he actually missed. But he knew, he couldn't allow himself to miss it. 

It was something that hadn't really existed. Not with the strength that Gerard had deluded himself into believing it had. Otherwise Mikey wouldn't have told his father about him and Frank.

Mikey would hopefully sort his own shit out in time. Because as much as Gerard hated him, he still loved him. He had to. It was ingrained in him. Whether by blood or by childhood, he still had to wish Mikey the best.

Gerard hoisted himself off of Frank's lofted bed, landing not nearly as gracefully as Mitch had. He walked over to the dresser where Frank had given Gerard free range of the vacant drawers. On the way, he passed the closet.

He couldn't help but stare at his bare back, the lighter shade of pinkish flesh contrasting the tan he'd acquired over the sunnier months of New Jersey. Jagged, healing, marks broke up the smooth flesh, from where he'd been thrown to the ground repeatedly only a week ago. 

Frank wore them with a sort of pride. He wasn't quick to cover them up when he noticed Gerard looking, not as Gerard had been with his face and his neck. He even smiled a bit. He knew that, among them, were the ghosted pinkish trails of scratches from last night. 

Frank didn't turn away. He just kept eye contact with Gerard, from the reflection in the mirror. But Gerard quickly felt his own face growing pink, and turned away to find some clothes to wear.

"Happy birthday." he said, still keeping his embarrassed face turned away. 

"Thanks." he said. "You know what we're gonna do before school?"

He let the question linger while the both of them finished, clothing themselves well enough for school attire. 

"Cigarettes." Frank said, staring into the mirror as he began his makeup. "Legally, kind of. It'll be a hell of a lot cheaper at least."

He turned around, displaying his outfit like some mock fashion-model. 

His makeup resembled The Crow very much, only his mouth had little tendrils of black crawling outwards. Almost like some loose interpretation of teeth. 

He donned pretty regular clothes, a zip-up Avenged Sevenfold hoodie, a faded t-shirt, some black skinny jeans. But he had these little gloves sticking out of either side of his sleeves. They were these costume-shop type skeleton gloves. Only he'd taken some scissors to the end and made them fingerless, letting the ends fray out in a fashion that seemed very much like him.

"Alright." Gerard said. "And happy Halloween."

He, himself, was wearing a suitjacket. He'd bought recently from the Salvation Army for something like four dollars. He'd wanted one that fit better than his old ones, which now hung off of him like he was a coat-rack. 

His face had been bloodied up. Like a zombie that had battled some razor-wire, making his cuts and bruises look intentional. He didn't heal as quick as Frank, probably due to more shit health, so he had to cover more up. But it was Halloween, so it worked.

He wore the same borrowed scarf, which Frank had let him keep. It remind himself that he wasn't floating off into obscurity. Even when he was away from the one person left who would really notice, or generally give a shit, if he were to disappear. 

As much as he loved his grandmother, he knew even she wouldn't be phased by Gerard's disappearance. His family would convince himself and in turn convince everyone else. Everyone but Frank. And Ray, Ray knew Gerard wasn't the most reliable. He was convinced Ray wouldn't really be surprised, if Gerard just up and disappeared. 

But he was here and he was alive. Thanks to Frank in some part. He was okay.

He was so fucking okay. For real this time. For permanent. He could feel it in his bones.

They left for school together, hand in hand. Frank didn't have the same paranoia as Gerard, and Gerard no longer gave a shit. He'd been found out. 

Everyone at school was convinced Frank was gay, anyway. Even if he wasn't, nor had he said anything. But in high school, just like pretty much everywhere, it didn't change anything. 

As for Gerard, no one really remembered him, and no one would probably remember him after this. There was no surprise, because there was no expectation. 

But they still couldn't kiss. The feeling of being watched still hung around, despite the beautiful atmosphere of the faded autumn sky.

The day went smoothly. He wrote a letter for Frank, and talked to Ray about printing out a glossy version of their work.

Ray worked at a print shop, something which he'd mentioned a few times before. Thankfully, it got him access to cheaper prints. So Gerard could actually afford splitting the print cost, because this gift would be perfect. Personalized. A symbol of how far they'd come, and a promise that they would be okay.

Their fear was nothing more than a story. And they would make it.

That Gerard was happy. Really truly happy. Not even a fleeting happiness, because he knew that, at least for the next while, he could be happy with Frank. 

Twenty-five, he would make it. He knew it, the scarf wrapped 'round his neck never pulling even once. Not even as a joke. 

There was never a need for Frank to worry.

He and Frank spent the afternoon setting up Frank's birthday party. It was going to be a proper party, but his parents had set a cap on twenty guests, and he had to make sure to get refunds for any damages. 

Gerard felt a bit alienated by the level of trust Frank's parents placed in Frank, but the alienation was welcomed. He didn't know parents could be like that. According to Mikey, or at least as he had claimed in the past, not even Pete's parents would leave him to throw a party alone.

But Pete had a bit of a reputation for causing havoc, and not the same way as Frank had, So it kind of made sense.

The party was Halloween-themed, Frank not bitter in the slightest that he shared his birthday with a popular holiday. In fact, he fucking reveled in it.

Gerard was amused by it, and how it seemed to effect just about every corner of his life. Because, this was Frank, and of course it did. He was just as dramatic a little fuck as Gerard himself was. Even if he didn't like admitting it.

They'd first paid Pete to get some booze. He could get it cheaper than if he and Gerard were to pay someone off to go in to get it for them. Besides, they had other things they needed to get done. 

They took the remainder of the budget and went to a series of thrift shops and antique stores. It was the perfect place to find not-shitty, not-expensive, properly spooky decorations.

"You know, I could imagine decorating an apartment with a lot of this." Gerard said while perusing the stemmed glasses. "I could get a job soon and be out of your hair in a few months' time."

"Aww, come on." Frank said. He was picking out a bunch of mismatched glasses that were the vague shape of martini glasses, but none of them really were, Obscured by different dips and stripes in the glass. "I like having you in my hair. And besides, you can't just drop out of school when you're so close to graduating."

"I never said I would." Gerard said. He moved on to the overflow of candelabras, a result of being located in the basement of a church. "I'll find some studio with cheap rent and work after school, and bust my ass over Christmas break. My grandma'll cosign if I need someone to, and I'll be fine. We can have the whole place to ourselves, even, whenever you come over."

"We could even live together, in that case. It would make the cost cheaper and I love having you in my hair, believe it or not." Frank said.

"Maybe." Gerard said. 

He really liked having Frank there, Renting an apartment together would make him feel a lot less guilty than crashing at his place indefinitely did. But he still wasn't certain if he would be entirely okay when the time rolled around. 

He didn't want Frank to see him at those points. Like that night in his grandparents' basement. Like that time on his front stoop. It was a darkness that seemed to infect everything, even if he felt infinitely happy now.

Frank was fine, sure, but that was temporary. In time the stains would begin to show, if Gerard wasn't careful. 

Only time would tell, and for once Gerard was okay with that. Because either way, Frank was still there. He was a constant in a sea of uncertainty.

Even Ray was beginning to become a constant. He spent a lot of time with him, whenever he was away from Frank. He didn't really know Gerard. At least, not the side which had been sliced open and exposed to Frank. But he was a constant. 

Besides, Gerard didn't want those ever-imbuing stains to infect Ray either.

But none of it stopped Gerard from daydreaming. Because, twenty-five. He'd make it. And Frank would be there by his side.

Night rolled around, and the house had been set up. Frank had wished his mother and father a happy night of Halloween festivities, and they wished him the same for both Halloween and his birthday. His parents cried a bit when Gerard had disappeared to get some stuff from the room. 

They didn't notice that Gerard would see them from the top of the stairs, but he could. They wept, but they were smiling, because Frank was an adult now. Gerard had only seen that type of stuff in movies, but it warmed his heart to see it in real life.

He waited until they'd stopped their sentimentality to descend, to wish them a pleasant Halloween. And then he and Frank were left alone in the house.

The door closed, echoing through the house. For once, his head, too, was silent. This was the first time they'd been alone in a long time. Really, properly, alone. 

Not that Frank realized that Gerard had been hanging around with the ghouls in his head during his stay on Madison, but he could see that he knew this was different. Completely different headspace. So, so much better.

And they had talked about the future. Scary, but it kept Gerard hanging on, for that promise of something better. Twenty-five had been the number for the longest time, but he'd doubted he'd make it 'til then. 

Until recently. And he'd never even really thought about the space, between eighteen and twenty-five. Focused solely on escaping home instead. 

"To adulthood." Gerard said.

He toasted an imaginary glass with Frank, who had been sipping on a can of Red Bull.

He kissed Frank a happy-birthday kiss. It felt different here, in the corridor, than it did when they'd kiss in Frank's room.

It wasn't closed off. It was innocent, yet unabashed. 

It was innocent until of course it wasn't. But by the time Gerard had sunk to his knees, someone once again had arrived at the door.

"Every fucking time." Frank joked, as he fixed himself up to go answer the door.

This time it was expected, though. 

Gerard finished touching up his own fucked-up hair and makeup just as Pete entered the house, booze in tow. 

Pete had brought someone else, but Gerard couldn't tell who. Whoever they were, Frank was having a conversation with them. He couldn't hear whoever else was talking, or what even Frank was talking about. But he had that serious tone that Gerard had grown to dread, because it never same with good implications.

He went over to see who it was. He peered around the corner, just in case he really didn't want to see who it was. Or maybe they wouldn't want to see him. 

He peered around the corner and saw a face that filled him with dread and rage and relief all at once. It took him a bit to see past the Jason Voorhees mask. But the emotion punched him right in the gut when he realized. It was Mikey.

"Fucks' sake, Mikey!" Gerard spat. 

He couldn't yell. He refused to pull that shit. But he couldn't fully restrain his anger, now that he was here. With the audacity to show up at Frank's fucking birthday, after getting Gerard kicked out for dating Frank.

"What in the fuck are you doing here?"

"Gerard," Mikey said hurriedly, "You got it messed up, I-"

"Fucks' sake, you can't just show up here like you're all fucking upstanding Mikey Fuckin' Way who didn't fuck me over only a few fucking days ago." Gerard said. "You fucking knew I would be here, so why did you show up?" 

"You got it messed up," Mikey said, voice tinged with a sadness which rarely emanated from his words. "I didn't tell him."

It tugged at Gerard's heart, but he tried his best to ignore it. He had to. He had to stay on track.

"Okay, then how the fuck did he know? No one else but you and Frank knew."

"Chrissake, Gerard! You left Frank's fucking clothes laying around! I didn't do shit!" Mikey said, "You know I wouldn't do shit!"

"Then why the fuck didn't you tell me?"

"I couldn't." Mikey said. "You fucking blocked me. You fucking avoid me constantly." 

He sounded defeated, and it killed Gerard. More than it killed him to know he'd been wrong. Or even that he had lost faith in Mikey. 

It killed him that he had defeated Mikey. It just felt so terribly wrong.

Gerard embraced Mikey, who stood there dumbly before finally hugging him back. He missed Mikey. He missed the real Mikey, not the monster which had been infecting his thought for the past week. 

He hugged him so tight, like he was making sure he'd never let this real Mikey escape his mind again. This was Mikey.

"I'm sorry." he said. 

He was crying, but it wasn't only sad. In fact, it was a happy sort of sad. Happy he'd been wrong. Happy they'd sorted it out. Happy everything could be okay again. That he wouldn't have to forget Mikey, like he'd been trying to these past few days. 

"I know." Mikey said, and Gerard smiled. 

There was no bullshit. No 'it's alright'. Just as there shouldn't have been.

Guests started to file in. There were definitely more than twenty people, but it wasn't so outrageous that the party would be uncontrollable. 

Ray eventually turned up with the other portion of their joint gift to Frank. A glossy comic-book version of their work, even better than Gerard could've imagined. The finalized pieces which had made their way to the pages, found as finalized pieces scattered around his grandparents' place. Undoubtedly from his lost window of time.

The party went well, more of a large hang out than an actual party. Gerard got the notion that it was better that way, though. 

Eventually it died down. Everyone who was spending the night was in the living room, either huddled around the television watching horror movie marathons or passed out. He and Frank stuck around for a bit, but eventually left the scene to go for a midnight walk. 

Frank lived in a safer neighborhood than Gerard used to live. And besides, Gerard never left home without his trusty knife. So he felt alright, even if the creeping feeling still lingered. As it always did.

They wandered, continuing their talks of life and the future that they had begun at the thrift shop. Of Gerard's revelations, and Frank's hopes and dreams. Frank talked about college, but he mostly focused on starting up a band. Touring the country and all in that shitty van he'd cruised around in all summer.

Gerard didn't have as much to share, because he didn't envision past twenty-five. His life was great in the moment, and he wasn't looking for an out or even accepting of an out. He wanted to stay here in this life with Frank.

But twenty-five was distant enough to be highly uncertain. Realistically, he and Frank wouldn't make it to twenty-five, but he didn't share this with Frank. Of course. He just shared the magic number: twenty-five.

But Frank didn't like twenty-five.

"Twenty-seven." Frank said. He didn't sound sad, thankfully. Maybe a bit somber. "At least promise me you'll make it to twenty-seven. 

"Fine." Gerard said. 

It wasn't like he didn't want to make it to twenty-seven. But he didn't know how. Not that Frank would be there to force him to keep the promise if they were no longer in constant contact, like they were then and there. 

Maybe he'd find something, anything bigger to hold onto than escape. He doubted it, but maybe in his time with Frank he'd fivgure it out. To cling on during those in-between years.

"Two years more" Gerard said, trying to make it convincing. For both his and Frank's sake. "Promise, I'll make it to twenty-seven."

"Twenty-seven." Frank echoed. "We'll both make it."

Gerard wanted to ask him what he meant, but the creeping feeling reached an all time high.

Something was wrong.

"I think we should-" Gerard began, but it was too late.

He felt his head go numb before rushing with pain, and finally falling out of this world.

Descending back into blackness. 

Down, down, down. To sleep. To terrors.


	13. Violent Things

No. This wasn't happening. This couldn't happen. This was a cruel joke, a Halloween prank. Sure, their town was no stranger to break-ins, robberies, shit like that. 

A robbery, that's what this was, right? Something in his gut told him otherwise. Something in the familiarity of the shadows and the way they shifted as they stared into Gerard's very soul.

He slowly came to. His knees were gnawed at by the cement flood, an acrid odor seizing his lungs.

A box, only without a roof. No bird and no gauze over his eyes. But Frank was there.

Living nightmare. Living hell.

No one would find them, not here.

Fate settled in the air like a heavy glue. Threatening to set, trapping them for all eternity.

No.

They would survive this.

They had lives to live. Answers to find. People to become. They were Gerard and Frank. They were invincible. They were immortal.

As long as they were together, nothing could bring them down. Not now, not ever.

Some bitter stone shone through the honey coating. Some god-awful realization settled across the silence. Connecting them in a notwork of sheer terror. Maybe this was immortality. 

Truth was, Gerard was okay with dying. Of not making it to twenty-seven as he'd promised. 

But not like this. And not Frank.

No. He'd finally found some goddamn reason to live. He'd found the light at the end of the tunnel. And now this person, their kidnapper, this awful fucking person wanted to douse the lights. 

He hugged Frank close. He was crying too. 

Probably over the same thing. The same god-awful thing that they didn't dare speak of. Because if they said it, it became real. Far more real than they wanted it to be. He wanted to be back. Back in their fairytale. Back int their daydream where everything was alright again.

Maybe is he held tight enough, they could go back. In their minds at least. Think happy little lies. 

He wished, more than anything to think nothing but happy little lies. 

But they couldn't.

A tall person nestled the muzzle of a gun between the cherry locks of Gerard's hair.

The sky threw down all its water. Thrashing at their skin in sheets. Drowning them before they got the chance to die.

Gerard willed the storm to set him ablaze. Strike him down before this monster could.

But it never happened. Instead, the monster handed him the gun. 

Telling Gerard, "shoot him." Nodding toward Frank. 

Telling him, "send him down to hell, where he belongs.", promising "Shoot him and you can fix your life. Shoot him and you'll be spared."

Gerard cried. He cried more than he thought a person could. He cried so much he felt he could've drowned in his tears. It would've been more merciful than this hell. But his weeping couldn't save him.

Frank cried too. But he was smiling. Some sick, hopeless smile. Like hope, only cancerous. 

"Shoot me." he said. "Do it, Gerard."

"I can't." Gerard sobbed. "I won't"

"Please," he begged, "I can't have you die. I need you to live."

"If you die I die too, you know that." Gerard said. He didn't know if it was true. He wasn't sure, but it felt set in stone. Frank was the one thing keeping his life together. Threading all the mangled pieces together in some horrific yet beautiful life. If he was gone, it all fell apart. 

He would die to.

Either at his own hand or someone else's.

Frank wouldn't listen though. 

"There's a lot of things about me you don't know." Frank said, his words both still and trembling at once. "Things you should never know and that's why you have be the one to keep living. Just know that, no matter what, I'll always love you. Even as a ghost or as I'm burning in hell or wandering forever in purgatory, I'll always love you. But you and I know there's only one way out of this. And you're getting out alive. Now pull the goddamn trigger."

Gerard trembled so violently, it felt more like convulsions. Frank pulled Gerard in for one last perfect kiss before placing his hands over Gerard's. Putting the gun straight to his forehead.

"Pull damn it. Pull or I'll make you. You're not dying on my watch. Just promise you'll never forget me. Promise you'll be everything and everyone you want to be. Twenty-seven. Fuck, make it past twenty-seven. Grow old and wrinkly as hell."

"I love you." Gerard whispered. He'd never admitted it to anyone before, never said it and truly meant it.

"I love you too." He tried to imagine the oceanside where he and Frank had spent their first real time together. Running away from class and home and just about everywhere to be with each other. 

But the waves were violent and drowned the rocks in dead fish and birds and jellyfish. The sun wasn't streaming through the clouds, replaced by a blood-red sky covered in black smokey clouds. 

Fading into the sound of their quiet sniffles and labored breath. Trying to catch once last glimpse of happiness before it fell apart. 

For the first time in years, he knew that he really mattered to someone. And for the first time he had seen some horizon of life beyond hell, but it was all coming to a horrible end. 

The thought gripped his intestines and twisted his insides, spasming his back, but it barely went noticed. Not even now could he let himself react in full.

With one last tear escaping Frank's left eye, he pressed.

Two gunshots rang across the New Jersey sky, as the church clock struck Midnight.

**Author's Note:**

> !!content warnings!!: smut, murder, suicide, stalking, night terrors & nightmares, hallucinations, abuse, kidnapping, allusions to substance abuse and disordered eating


End file.
